E.T.H.O.S.|Ethical Technology in the Homes of Seniors

The NRC recently put out a report on the major challenges for how to use technology for “effective” health care (prepublicaiton version).  They have a lot of good things to say, including a focus on patient empowerment.  It is nice to see this patient-centered approach… a movement away from an all-too-often paternalistic view of doctors simply telling patients what to do, and expecting them to follow their instructions.

They’ve also brought in a nice vision of what pervasive computing can do.  Instead of focussing soley in current information systems and electronic health records, they include examples that are well-known to researchers in the field, but perhaps not thought about by medical professionals or lay people.  As an example:

A clinician needs to know what medications an elderly, memory-
challenged patient is taking.  Recognizing the important difference
between medications prescribed and medications taken, the clinician asks
the patient to bring all of his pill containers, both prescription and over­
the-counter, to the appointment.  She asks the patient to place all of the
containers on a surface table computer, which automatically identifies the
medications in each of the containers and counts the number of pills
remaining in each container.  The pill containers also carry RFID tags, on
which the initial fill-up quantities of the containers are stored.  The table
can read these tags, and thereby make an inference about what pills
were actually taken and provide information about likely compliance with
a particular medication regime.

And now with President Obama recognizing the need to use technology to address our overtaxed health care system, we can hope the funding institutions like NIH and NSF will start prioritizing health informatics research.