Digital health care and privacy issues

Technology and the profit motive combine to offer us tremendous benefits -- often life-saving ones. But this combination also challenges our right to privacy. Take, for example, the amazing new health care devices unveiled at the recent Intel Developer Forum (IDF) conference held in San Francisco.

Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld

Intel, like many corporations Wall Street requires to grow at double-digit rates, feeds voraciously off the mass market. It isn’t surprising, then, that Intel is targeting health care. A potentially huge market, health care needs the kind of semiconductor technology that is Intel’s strength.

At IDF, Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel’s nine-month-old Digital Health Group, told a rapt audience -- representing companies that feed equally voraciously off mass market sales -- that the world’s population is aging rapidly. By the year 2050, he said, 21 percent of the global population will be over 60 years old.

China alone plans to construct 3,000 new hospitals. And in the United States, 15 percent of the GDP (gross domestic product) is spent on health care. It’s estimated that the cost of health care will grow to 25 percent of the GDP in 20 years.

The Digital Health Group designed the truly amazing prototype devices on display at IDF to address the growing need for health care. Unfortunately, the devices also create yet another fissure in the privacy wall.

Burns said, for example, that with the right telemetry, a doctor could monitor heart patients at home to make sure they adhered to exercise programs and took their medication. Imagine the meds sitting on a shelf like the candy in the courtesy bar of a hotel room. When you lift a pill bottle, it breaks a contact, sending data back to the hospital. But what if that same information is also sent to your health insurer?

“Don’t exercise and don’t take your meds and we won’t pay for your health care.” Seems logical enough, doesn’t it? Of course, your insurer might offer you a lower rate if you’re willing to use the device.

The most dramatic use of wireless technology for in-home care that Burns cited was Intel’s work with Parkinson’s disease patients. Intel employees spent weeks living in the households of 100 Parkinson’s sufferers to understand their health care needs.

Here’s just one result. A standard Parkinson’s test taken in a doctor’s office measures how quickly a patient can place pegs into a peg board from left to right. With a new device, patients can do this test at home, linked wirelessly to the doctor’s office. On a regular basis, the doctor receives accurate measurements of the degree of tremors -- more accurate, in fact, than a visual observation -- and the device can even give the doctor a trend line.

Perhaps the motor vehicle bureau should also be sent the results of this test for consideration when renewing the patient’s driver’s license. And not just for drivers with Parkinson’s disease; shouldn’t anyone over the age of 65 take a similar test?

Outlandish, you say? Well, if someone told you 20 years ago that people would willingly allow a supermarket to keep a database of every item they ever bought in return for a discount, would you have believed it?

The funny thing about a future in which you can run but you can’t hide is that, in most cases, it’s going to be an opt-in decision.