Wednesday 30 April 2008

Innovations in healthcare and well-being

As I have captured my thoughts on the Digital Society over the last few years, I felt I had touched on so many topics that it was time to split my blog into more focused themes. My posts have talked about various aspects of the Digital Society but has favoured topics centered around Education, Healthcare and software trends in general. There has also been a strong undercurrent of posts on "social enterpreneurship". I have been inspired by the classic from 1999 From Spare Change to Real Change: The Social Sector as Beta Site for Business Innovation

So the first spilt of my blog is on "Digital care and well-being". I believe this area poses the most commercial potential due to the aging baby-boomers. The choice to include well-being in the title of this blog was to highlight the fact that healthcare is more than being ill and also includes the preventive and quality-of-life perspective.

So what better way to start this blog than comment the British NHS' bold "Connecting for Health" initiative. With the recent change at the top, there appears to be a focus on using the initiative to drive innovation. See this comment. And while the perception that Healthcare in the US is poor, there are a lot of innovations that could come from the legislation that is driving standardisation and interoperability. See the HHS' priorities here.