Advancing health informatics has been listed as one of the 21st century’s greatest challenges by a panel of leading engineers and scientists.
The 14 ‘Grand Challenges in Engineering’ were unveiled at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting last week, by the panel from the US National Academy of Engineering.
Supporting the case for placing health informatics advances among the great challenges, the panellists say: “There is now consensus that a systematic approach to health informatics – the acquisition, management and use of information in health – can greatly enhance the quality and efficiency of medical care and the response to widespread public health emergencies.
“Health and biomedical informatics encompass issues from the personal to the global, ranging through from medical records for individual patients, to sharing data about disease outbreaks among government and international health organisations. Maintaining a healthy population in the 21st century will require systems engineering approaches to redesign care practices and integrate local, regional, national and global informatics networks.”
Other big topics in the list of challenges include: securing cyberspace, engineering better medicines, making solar energy economical, preventing nuclear terrorism and reverse engineering the brain [advancing artificial intelligence].
Committee member and Google co-founder Larry Page said: "If we focus our effort on the important grand challenges of our age, we can hugely improve the future."
The panel was established in 2006 and met several times to discuss and develop the list of challenges. Through an interactive website, the effort received worldwide input from prominent engineers and scientists, as well as from the general public, over a one-year period. More than 50 experts in the different fields reviewed the panel’s conclusions.
The final choices fall into four themes that are essential for humanity to flourish: sustainability, health, reducing vulnerability, and joy of living. The panellists say they did not attempt to include every important challenge, nor did they endorse particular approaches to meeting those selected. Rather than focusing on predictions or gadgets, the goal was to identify what needs to be done to help people and the planet thrive.
"We chose engineering challenges that we feel can, through creativity and commitment, be realistically met, most of them early in this century," said committee chair and former US Secretary of Defense William J. Perry. "Some can be, and should be, achieved as soon as possible."
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Grand Challenges for Engineering