Enterprise Computing in Healthcare Sector: Emerging Trends and Future Challenges

Enterprise distributed computing has made rapid strides in many sectors of the economy, such as telecommunications and finance sectors. Organizations are now reaping benefits of these advances through better efficiency and better quality of services worldwide. There have been attempts by many groups to implement such benefits in the healthcare sector, the largest business sector in the world. However, this sector presents some unique challenges that have to be overcome if enterprise computing has to succeed in this sector. This talk will present an overview of emerging trends and future challenges in this field based the presenter's experience in the areas on integrated service management and e- Health through the leadership of a number of global initiatives, such as the WHO eHealth for Healthcare Delivery (eHCD) involving six countries, ITU-D Mobile e-Health initiative (m-Health) for Developing countries involving 20 countries and the International ubiquitous Healthcare initiative (u-Health) that led to the formation of a chain of research centres called Asia-Pacific u-Health research Centre (APuHC) in Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and India. People involved in these initiatives meet at IEEE Healthcom (founded by this presenter) every year (see www.healthcom2008.org).