Health

Description:

Health is an issue that attracts almost everybody. People wants to live longer and more healthy what stimulates the development of medicine. There are more advanced medical equipments, more miracle drugs, more experienced doctors and the most important is more communication and cooperation in this field all over the world. Trying to cure the patient is no longer the task of a single hospital. Whenever there is some kind of illness that a doctor or the doctors in certain districts can not cure, they could get help from other doctors from other districts in the same country or even from other countries. It breaks through the boundary of time and space. We could imagine that all the hospitals in the world works just like a single one.

Enablers:

• Technological advances in the field of medical equipments on the basis of the development of theoretics of the acoustics, optics, electronics, and so on.
  
• Advanced communication methods such as video conference, email, mobile phone, Internet, etc. Experts could communicate with any other expert, anytime, anywhere .
  
• Rapid development of biology and chemistry by what a lot of effective medicines are invented. Lots of illness that could not be cured in the past are easily cured nowadays.
  
• Knowledgeble, high educated and strictly trained doctors and nurses are available.
  
• Convenient and high-speed transportation. The delivery of medicines, experts, medical equipments could be worldwide and is achieved in short time.
  

Inhibitors:

• Some hospitals are still using traditional way of recording that is based on paper. So those information is not available to others.
  
• Interface problem. Different hospitals usually use different systems. The data in one system may not be accessed by other systems.
  
• Internet security. The systems should be reliable and not easily broken down by illegal attack.
  

Paradigms:

In the past the people who are suffering from cancer have little chance to survive. Nowadays the leukaemia recovery rate has been increased from 20% to 80%. [1]

Timing:

Cost reductions in IT in relation with flexibility can only be accomplished when the problems surrounding grid computing are resolved or other solutions present themselves. Already they have come a long way but a lot of work still has to be done.

Web Resources:

[1] A vision for the future, 2003, MRC(Medical Research Council)