Digital Medicine: Health Care In The Internet Era

Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Article Date: 05 Jun 2009 - 4:00 PDT

email to a friend   printer friendly   view / write opinions   rate article

With more than $19 billion in new spending planned for health information technology, the Obama administration is taking serious steps toward modernizing the U.S. health care system. Implementing health IT can reduce both costs and errors, but it requires extensive information infrastructure upgrades. Few hospitals, clinics or private practices have the funds to pay for new technology. The new Brookings Institution Press book Digital Medicine: Health Care in the Internet Era investigates the factors affecting digital technology's ability to remake health care.

Darrell M. West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at Brookings, and Edward Alan Miller, assistant professor at Brown University, explore the political, social and ethical challenges presented by online health care, as well as the impact that racial, ethnic and other disparities are having on the e-health revolution. They examine the accessibility of health-related websites for different populations and ask how we can close access gaps and ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of the information presented online.

Governments, hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical manufacturers have placed a tremendous amount of medical information, data and services online in recent years. However, few people use the Internet to search for health information, purchase prescription drugs online or e-mail health care providers. West and Miller use original survey research and website analysis to study the content, sponsorship status and public usage of these health care-related websites. They examine the relationship between e-health utilization and attitudes about health care in the United States and explore the use of health information technology in other countries. The authors find that information technology will not dramatically improve health care in America until policy-makers and health care officials understand and address key obstacles such as technology costs, electronic communications problems, ethical issues, privacy concerns and disparities between social groups.

The Authors

Darrell M. West is vice president and director of Governance Studies at Brookings. Previously, he was the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. He is the author of 16 books, including Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance (Princeton, 2005), Biotechnology Policy across National Boundaries (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) and Air Wars: Television Advertising in Election Campaigns, 1952-2008 (CQ Press, 2009).

Edward Alan Miller is currently an assistant professor of public policy, political science, and community health at Brown University and faculty associate at Brown's Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research. Next fall he will become an associate professor of public policy and gerontology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. A former Fulbright scholar and social policy analyst at the Congressional Research Service trained in political science and health services research at Yale University and the University of Michigan, he is the author of more than 80 journal articles, book chapters and reports on aging and long-term care, telemedicine and e-health, and intergovernmental relations.

Source
The Brookings Institution