I recently attended an Executive Healthcare Briefing at Oracle where the new mantra was that the “Internet changes everything”. I have thought a lot about that phase since I first heard it and have been trying to think of things that the Internet hasn’t changed…at least not for the immediate future. While I am a big proponent of things that can be done on the Internet I still wonder how hard it will be to break some very old habits, like grocery shopping, clothes shopping, buying a new car on the lot or seeking healthcare services!

Lets focus on healthcare services for a minute. Taking some recently released numbers from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, (NAMCS) I discovered that in 1997, Americans spent the equivalent of nearly 18 centuries seeing their doctors. That’s right, in one year alone Americans spent 24,460 years worth of time with their physicians! Now here might be a good place to start in trying to use the Internet to change behavior. How many person years could we save if we showed up at the doctors with “old” information out of the way and “new” information easily at their fingertips?

The San Bernardino County (home of ESRI) public health department issues a fax or a beeper page to high school athletic coaches on days of elevated smog! That’s right. The staff meteorologist scans the weather forecast and air quality data and issues an alert intended to warn coaches of impending bad air quality in their respective geography. Some coaches reduce students outside physical activity after receiving the alert and reschedule the group activity for other times. Perhaps this is a prime time idea that could easily extend beyond high school coaches...perhaps to patients’ themselves suffering asthma or allergeric reactions to air-borne pollution. Perhaps we could sign up for a personal monitoring service warning us about impending health problems? Perhaps local government could extend this service to other detractors of our environment or personal safety such as crime, traffic, and issue “just-in-time” warning of impending danger or elevated risks?

Here are several things I would like the Internet to change for the good in healthcare.

• Automatic notification of potential exposures to environmental risks (dirty air, bad water, and contaminated food)
• Automatic notifications about emerging research about “cures” which relates to the conditions I have already reported to my doctor.
• Automatic alerts about potential drug interventions from my pharmacist
• Reduction of the amount of time spent providing administrative information to healthcare providers

Healthcare providers who understand the power of the Internet will find ways to leverage their time. Lets hope that they also find ways to help us spend more of our time staying healthy!

Healthy people will be using GIS!