Information Technology for the Healthcare Enterprise

Health care spending in the United States is estimated to grow at the rate of 7.3% per year. (More information). This amount will reach $2.9 trillion dollars by 2011 (around 17% of the GDP). Information technology, i.e., health care informatics, plays a very important role in all aspects of the health care enterprise, and is crucial to reducing the health care costs. We use the term "health care informatics" for all software aspects of the healthcare enterprise: health information technology, modeling and simulation, bioinformatics, medical devices integration, and bioimaging. In this talk, I will discuss our work on health care informatics, focusing on: 1) Testing the nationwide health information network; 2) Medical device interoperability; 3) Systems biology/medicine, with a focus on protein-protein interaction; and 4) Medical/bioimaging.

Speaker: Ram D. Sriram, Chief, Software and Systems Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology