Biomedical Information Technology: Opportunities For The Future

This group/ panel discussion will focus on three areas: 1.Disease Management and Prevention, 2.IT Impact on Health Services Research, and 3.Applications in Biomedical Research. The intention of this presentation is to tie fiom an information technology perspective, a vision which will allow for improvements in outcomes, quality of life while decreasing costs. The emphasis will be in disease prevention, rather than diagnosis / treatment as currently practiced in most countries, and broad consumer as well as provider education. Information technology components are many. Besides the common topics of: vocabulary, coding, and standards on one hand and the information infrastructure, i.e. Internet, Internet2, Next Generation Internet, on the other, the areas of particular interest are: the integration of very large knowledge repositories, multimedia, virtual environments, data base and knowledge processing technology as well as intelligent sensors and U 0 devices. The major threads will include: knowledge processing and cognition, knowledge repositories, connectivity and interaction, information agents and environments. Some of the applied topics include: summarization (fusion encoding; visualization), queries, intelligent transactions, distributed intelligence and meta agents. The application areas are: home care, the elderly, chronic disease prevention and genetics.