Intranets advance medical care

Physician Executive, June, 1996 by Marshall Ruffin

Connect with all health plan members: Most providers don't know anything about the people they are not treating. Intranets offer them an opportunity to connect with the population of members they ought to get to know, and inform them about how to seek care when they want it and how to stay healthy. The network helps keep people in touch, so to speak. It is a powerful means for the health care organization to manage the health and the ailments of its health plan members and patients, and those members whom the plan helps to avoid becoming patients.

The era of electronic medical care is already here

Physicians have computers in their homes and offices and know how to use them. They have access to the Web, using commonly available browsers from either CompuServe (using Spry's Air Mosaic); America Online, Prodigy, Microsoft (Internet Explorer); Netscape (Netscape); and other derivatives of Mosaic from any one of a number of smaller firms.

AT&T is forcing down the price for access, giving their long-distance customers five free hours on the Internet per month, and everyone else a low fixed price for unlimited access. Cable TV companies are preparing their networks--that already reach into tens of millions of homes and offices, including those of many physicians--to offer Internet access through "cable modems" at data transfer rates much faster than those we can obtain with telephone modems.

While it may at first seem expensive to acquire the equipment and the knowledge to use the WWW, demographics of users show that every income group is well represented. Personal computers capable of accessing the Web outnumbered television sets sold in 1995, and the trend is estimated to continue. By the year 2000, most Americans will have PCs in their homes that resemble television sets.

Gateway 2000 has begun selling its Destination line of computers with fast Pentium processors, modems, and large hard disk and CD-ROM drives. Its monitor is 31 inches in diagonal size. It comes with a wireless, remote keyboard and controller, and, in fact, is ready for connections to standard coaxial cable TV. This device is a combination home computer and entertainment center. It is ready to attach to a camera to send video signals over a network, so it could be the sending and receiving station for teleconferencing.

This is the access point--physicians' own home pages on the WWW--for patients to learn how to care for themselves, about their health care benefits, the preventative, diagnostic, and therapeutic services available from local hospitals, and to participate in an electronic house call with a clinician at an urgent care center or emergency room. The advent of telemedicine into the home is nigh and the Internet and WWW, or a local cable TV firm, will probably be first to carry the data in your community.

The equipment to access Intranets for specific populations of patients and health plan members--with password protection to keep others out--is already in the homes and offices of most Americans, or will be shortly, at very affordable prices. The era of electronic medical care and home health is upon us. Innovative and telegenic physicians will be able to extend their preventive and therapeutic practice to more patients, in more locations.