Emerging Healthcare Delivery Paradigm for the 21st Century

other D2H2 enabling technologies and the clinic. Integrating these systems into the clinical workflow has been projected to be a large contributor to the transformation of the current healthcare system. Other major pulling forces behind the need for distributed diagnosis and care in the form of EHRs and personal health records (PHR) are the need for faster diffusion of medical knowledge, the need for reduction of medical errors, duplication of tests and misdiagnosis, and the need for more comprehensive knowledge bases of healthcare information. Although there are many EHRs and PHRs already developed, most require the manual, repetitive input of information, which can lead to no or slow adoption due to the increased workload and the workflow impediment of system integration into the clinic.

This new healthcare delivery system will introduce a new patient-doctor relationship based on partnership, where the patient will be involved in their healthcare more actively by being responsible for data collection and managing their health along with the provider, and where the provider-patient interactions in the clinic will have room for more decision-making and discussion. The overall healthcare system will be patient-centered, where the provider can be an overseer and aide to the patient in his/her more informed healthcare decision-makings and proactive management.

The era of a new healthcare delivery system is on the horizon, and stakeholders from government, industry, and academia as well as employers, insurance companies, care providers, and individuals need to come together to define a smooth path towards D2H2. By various stakeholders collaborating on D2H2 and its implementation and deployment, this new paradigm can be realized faster and rising healthcare costs contained, along with improved quality of care for the increasingly aging and chronically ill populations. To facilitate a smooth transition into increasingly distributed healthcare delivery from existing hospital-centric care and to balance the resources and care, carefully thought-out incentives, policies, and strategies need to be developed, tried, and optimized. Emphasis on early detection and prevention needs to be valued as well as ease of use and monitoring in the development of enabling or disruptive technology and integration into clinical systems. Interdisciplinary research and collaboration needs to be encouraged and supported in various ways to facilitate a quick transfer from clinically-useful technology developed in the laboratory to widespread clinical use via commercialization.

I believe that D2H2 is the most reasonable solution to overcome the crisis in current healthcare delivery, and that this new paradigm—with all the stakeholders working together toward the common and societal good—will aid in developing a sustainable 21st-century healthcare system with the potential to improve accessibility to healthcare, increase care quality, and control healthcare costs.

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Author: Yongmin Kim

Dr. Yongmin Kim received the B.S. degree in electronics engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1975, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin (Madison), in 1979 and 1982, respectively. From 1982 to 1986, he was Assistant Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. From 1986 to 1990, he was Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Adjunct Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Computer Science. From 1990, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering, Radiology, and Computer Science and Engineering. From March 1999 to June 2007, he was Professor and Chair of Bioengineering. Currently, he is Professor of Bioengineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Adjunct Professor of Radiology and Computer Science and Engineering. From 2004 to 2007, he was the W. Hunter and Dorothy L. Simpson Endowed Chair in Bioengineering. He has taught parallel computers, digital electronics and computer design, advanced microcomputer system design, digital image processing and applications, multimedia algorithms and systems, mediaprocessors, computer image generation, technology innovation and commercialization, and weekly seminar series on image computing, medical imaging and bioengineering. Also, he has offered various continuing education courses on image computing and multimedia, mediaprocessors, and advanced digital systems to many engineers around the world. His research interests include medical imaging and computing, ultrasound systems, electronic medicine, distributed diagnosis and home healthcare, and molecular imaging. He has participated heavily in the architecture definition and optimization as well as algorithm and system development for Texas Instruments TMS320C80 Multimedia Video Processor (MVP) and Hitachi/Equator Technologies Media Accelerated Processor (MAP). He has supervised 36 Ph.D. dissertations and 102 Masters theses, and currently is working with 15 Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering. Dr. Kim and his research group have made 85 inventions that have led to 70 patents, transferred the invented technologies to industry with 25 licenses, and helped commercialization of these technologies. He edited a book, Handbook of Medical Imaging (SPIE Press, 2000) and is a contributing author to many books. He has more than 450 research publications, and he is the editor of 13 Conference Proceedings. He was a member of the Advisory Board for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence from 1985 to 1994 and has been a member (Chairman during 1993-1994) of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging from 1990 to 1996 and again from 2007. He has been a member of the Editorial Board of Proceedings of the IEEE, the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, the IEEE Press series, and the Annual Reviews of Biomedical Engineering. He is the director of the Image Computing Systems Laboratory at the University of Washington. He was awarded the 1988 Early Career Achievement Award of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society for his contributions to medical imaging and the 2003 Ho-Am Prize in Engineering. In 2005, he received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering. He was the Program Chairman of the 1989 IEEE EMBS Conference and Conference Chair of the SPIE Medical Imaging Image Display Conference from 1990 to 1999. Also, he was Symposium Chair of the SPIE Medical Imaging consisting of seven conferences from 1998 to 2001. He organized and chaired the first conference on Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare on April 2006 in Washington, D.C., which was sponsored by IEEE, ASME, AMA, RSNA, HIMSS and other organizations. He has been a consultant to NIH, NSF, U.S. Army, MITRE, Texas Instruments, Intel, Siemens, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Canon, Samsung, Micron, and many other companies. He has served on the Board of Directors and the Technical Advisory Board of several companies. He is a member of the Department of Biomedical Engineering External Advisory Board for the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, University of Wisconsin, University of Utah and KAIST and an external reviewer for many academic programs. He has been an IEEE/EMBS distinguished lecturer since 1991 and Chair of the Distinguished Lecturer Committee in 1997 and 1998 and the Awards Committee in 2001 and 2002. From 1992 to 2006, he was an ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) program evaluator for computer engineering and bioengineering. He was a member of the IEEE Fellow Committee from 1998 to 2001. He was the Chair of the IEEE/EMBS Fellows Committee in 2003 and 2004. He was a member of the IEEE Awards Board and the IEEE TAB Periodicals Committee in 2005 and 2006. He was the President-Elect of the IEEE EMBS in 2004, the President of the IEEE EMBS in 2005 and 2006, and the Past President of the IEEE EMBS in 2007. Dr. Kim is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu.