Improving Healthcare Quality through Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare (D/sub 2/H/sub 2/)

The healthcare system in the U.S. is facing serious challenges on multiple fronts. In the past few decades, the financial burden of healthcare has increased significantly not only for the government and employers, but also for individual consumers. Most people would agree that the current healthcare system faces an impending crisis. In the future, the realization of patient-centered healthcare systems to improve care quality and alleviate the inefficiencies in conventional healthcare delivery will become critical. In this paper, we discuss several major challenges to improving healthcare quality: the aging population, lack of accessibility, inefficient communications, and the increasing complexity of healthcare. We then discuss how to tackle these issues through patient-centered healthcare delivery, specifically through the utilization of the distributed diagnosis and home healthcare (D₂H₂) paradigm. D₂H₂ is designed to integrate distributed, point-of-care diagnostics with electronic medical records, personal health records, and other clinical information systems in order to transform the current hospital-centric healthcare framework into one that is more patient-centered and home-based, enhancing disease prevention, early detection, and management as well as patient healthcare literacy. This paper discusses the tools currently used and being developed with the D₂H₂ paradigm and how these tools can aid in increasing healthcare accessibility, improving care quality, and potentially controlling healthcare costs