Managed Care - February 2009 - (Page 26) What Does the Future Hold For Disease Management? DM programs will have amazing patient-monitoring technology at their call. The challenge will be to make good use of the data. SEAN ELLIS/GETTY IMAGES By Steven S. Eisenberg, MD am not a soothsayer but I daresay that it is a pretty easy bet that the future of DM will be tied to increasingly available and increasingly sophisticated technological improvements. So let’s take a look at what seems to be coming down the pike and maybe what might still be around the corner. We start and end with the movement of data. The amount of that data has already grown exponentially and the thirst for more data and more types of data is continuing unabated. Places to store that data continue to get more efficient, larger, and cheaper, allowing the growth to continue. Ware- I houses in the hundreds and thousands of terabytes have been in existence for some time. Personal computers can come with a terabyte1 drive now, something that would have been considered unheard of even five short years ago. The databases of the future will hold much greater amounts of data in a smaller footprint; seamlessly integrate different types of data from a variety of different sources; and allow for “virtual” data warehouses and datamarts by seamlessly gathering and collating data from different and remote sources and creating a virtual picture of the data linked and integrated together. In fact, all of this can be done today. It just is not yet cheap, quick, and/or particularly easy. The data of today are moved in a variety of ways that is also getting quicker, cheaper and easier over time. It moves over telephone lines, via fax machines, and using the interactive voice response techniques discussed previously. It moves over large and small wired networks with names like localarea networks and wide-area networks at speeds that even a few years ago were not possible. Increasingly, the data move wirelessly, through the “ether,” as it used to be called, using technologies Steven S. Eisenberg, M.D., is senior vice president and chief science officer at LifeMasters Supported SelfCare Inc., based in Irvine, Calif. Contact Eisenberg at seisenberg@lifemasters.com. This article is excerpted from Chapter 6 of The Next Generation of Disease Management: 2009 and Beyond, edited by Jill Brown and Al Lewis. 26 MANAGED CARE / FEBRUARY 2009
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