Institute For The Future

On Personalized, Population Health

IFTF Senior Researcher Mike Liebhold delivered a keynote address on combinatorial innovation as part of a Department of Health and Human Services' meeting for its Roundtable Discussion on Personalized Population Health. His talk addressed some of the challenges of integrating personal information--from biosensors, mobile devices, and other day-to-day personal consumer technologies--with electronic health records and scientific research. He said that "our challenge is to use these technologies in a combined way." These combinations, coupled with on-demand super computing, could potentially enable real-time decision support tools for doctors, real-time information delivery for individual patients, and a tailoring of information to meet personalized needs.

After Mike's talk, a panel of technologists, geneticists and other researchers discussed some additional aspects of personalized population health. In addition to the promise of technology, others on the panel focused on using genomic screenings to improve medical treatment and improving health literacy to promote prevention and wellness. A few panelists also highlighted some challenges for health information management including the challenges of changing health behavior and the financial issues of figuring out who will pay to make the technology work.

Their discussion was fairly wide ranging--and covered everything from using game development to encourage health to end of life care--and you can catch up on more of the details by checking out our Twitter feed here or by reading through the tweets here.

Mike's presentation today stems from part of his work with IFTF's Health Horizons team and will be featured in our Health Care 2020 conferences this year. You can learn more about that research here.