Distributed diagnosis and home healthcare, its opportunities and challenges

Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare (D₂H₂) has been proposed as a new healthcare delivery framework in the 21st century. The goal of D₂H₂ is to improve quality of care and patient wellness and outcomes by transforming the delivery of healthcare from a central, hospital-based system to one that is more distributed, patient-centered and home-based. D₂H₂ has potentials to benefit patients by improving the quality and convenience of care, controlling healthcare cost, and preventing medical errors, thus leading to increased access to affordable and effective healthcare. In the 1st Transdisciplinary Conference on D₂H₂ in 2006, leaders from industry, academia and government participated in active discussion with more than 200 participants to exchange ideas and to discuss various aspects of issues and opportunities associated with realization of the D₂H₂, including the current status, important components/ingredients, their enabling technologies, and policies. Also, it is important to understand how this transformation might take place as well as the technical and non-technical challenges involved. Due to the complexity and scope of D₂H₂, collaboration between researchers, engineers, and providers from many traditional disciplines will be essential in order to overcome the potential obstacles and realize the full potential benefits of D₂H₂. We believe that the D₂H₂ 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, not only in the developed countries but also in the developing countries. This presentation will summarize the opportunities and challenges in D₂H_2.