The Personal Health Record Revolution
by Brian Mulconrey
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - As today's nano-scale health monitors churn out rivers of personal health data, powerful software agents are working 24 hours a day to interpret these signals - adjusting nutritional levels and applying medications as necessary. It's easy to forget that just ten short years ago it would have taken millions of health care workers to perform the services provided by these invisible health care robots. And of course, it's also easy to forget that, without personal health records (PHR), none of this would be possible. PHRs started in the late 20th century as a project to accumulate "provider" information (e.g., laboratory reports). But, as realtime monitoring tools exploded onto the market, it became clear that their real payoff would be in nano-scale personal laboratories that configure just in time treatment plans. It wasn't long before these monitoring tools lent themselves to the de-productization of the pharmaceutical industry with an explosion of custom drugs tailored to individual physical and DNA profiles.
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - As today's nano-scale health monitors churn out rivers of personal health data, powerful software agents are working 24 hours a day to interpret these signals - adjusting nutritional levels and applying medications as necessary. It's easy to forget that just ten short years ago it would have taken millions of health care workers to perform the services provided by these invisible health care robots. And of course, it's also easy to forget that, without personal health records (PHR), none of this would be possible. PHRs started in the late 20th century as a project to accumulate "provider" information (e.g., laboratory reports). But, as realtime monitoring tools exploded onto the market, it became clear that their real payoff would be in nano-scale personal laboratories that configure just in time treatment plans. It wasn't long before these monitoring tools lent themselves to the de-productization of the pharmaceutical industry with an explosion of custom drugs tailored to individual physical and DNA profiles.
In his 2004 book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins introduced the "intelligence-as-prediction" model. Once we combined the predictive power of hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) systems with PHRs it became possible to accumulate realtime insights into new drug formulations, and dosage levels while driving innovation by rapidly segmenting individuals into experimental treatment trials. With 2020 health care expenditures dipping below 5% of GDP in the United States and average life expectancies surging by 12 years in just the past decade we owe a great debt of gratitude to the humble PHR.
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