Resilient & pragmatic health IT for perilous times

Abstract

From rural United States to the battlefield and beyond, connecting patients with their formal and informal caregivers, along with emergency response workers - as well as providing each party with essential information that improves outcomes - are daunting challenges. There is currently great concern in the healthcare industry over health information technology (HIT), including high cost, security and privacy problems, health information exchange (HIE)1 failures, and weak decision support. In addition, universal connectivity is hampered by last mile connectivity2 and bandwidth constraints, poor interoperability, disaster vulnerability and other communication problems.Managing these challenges and concerns requires convenient, economical, secure, durable, flexible and easy-to-use, patient-centric HIT systems. These systems must deploy truly useful software applications and network architectures that help improve healthcare quality, safety and efficiency by enabling/promoting: Fluid exchange, transformation and personalized presentation of relevant cross-disciplinary health information • Rapid dissemination of evolving evidence-based decision support to clinicians and patients • Seamless communications between disparate data silos and with people in remote locations • Survivable and sustainable connectivity even in disaster situations • Timely delivery of de-identified patient data to researchers.That means twenty-first century HIT systems must operate quickly and stably in a wide variety of situations and settings, including locations were Internet access is intermittent or sluggish. This means the US needs to embrace next-generation HIT if it is going to contain healthcare costs, radically improve care and lead the world into the twenty-first century.This paper will present creative RAS3 solutions, available today, which leverage novel node-to-node technology4 to satisfy the unmet challenges described above. © 2011 IEEE.