Lifespan Health Planning

Lifespan Health Planning: "The Lifespan Planning Record offers an exciting vision of how radically different our health care future could be. Born today, the newborn child’s LPR would already be inhabited with a great deal of data – ranging from some reasonable compilation of the records of parents, grandparents and siblings to future diagnostic and preventive therapeutic measures, based on familial information. Print, video and graphic information from other accessible intelligence databases would be seamlessly interwoven. As time passes, this “living record” would flexibly grow and adjust to assist informed decision making, preventive behavior and full and complete human development.

But what does this have to do with Google and cell phones?

The answer is that the LPR can only be realized through significant advances in our technology infrastructure. And Google’s most recent action begins to address several hurdles that stand in the way of the LPR. One is the problem of bandwidth and transporting information – a curve Google is clearly ahead of. Second, people -- especially those with a high burden of chronic disease and those challenged by socioeconomic factors -- often don’t own computers or have trouble using them. But cell phones are everywhere. Third, the development of new applications is a must – to help people manage complex medical knowledge and to store vast amounts of data. And Google has already started down this road."