There is an intense debate currently ongoing in the U.S. on directions for health care systems and the technological support for them. Because of the many lacunae that are still apparent in the use of computer technology in Health care, a study has been commissioned at the National Research Council on Engaging the Computer Science Research Community in Health Care Informatics. This work is currently in process. The presentation will review some of the observations, but cannot formally report any findings prior to release of the study.

We will briefly review some of the successes from the past, and then identify what the problems are that have prevented these successes to be more broadly adopted. Since the acceptance of innovations depends on the cooperation of clinicians we will present a sketch of the interactions and tools that can be envisaged in a future patient-clinician setting.

We will present two areas where CS technological advances have to become accepted and dependable to serve health care needs: (1) Software architecture that can respond to change, adaptation, and specialization, (2) Integration of data sources, data mining, model building, and result projection.

We will also discuss the interaction of the players in the current health care debate.


Gio Wiederhold is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Medicine at Stanford University. He still consults and teaches annually a Stanford course “Business on the Internet”.

Gio Wiederhold was born in Italy, received early schooling in Germany, a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in Holland in 1957, and a PhD in Medical Information Science from the University of California at San Francisco in 1976. Before becoming an academic Gio spent 16 years in the software industry, building data acquisition and information systems, often in the medical domain. He spent 1991-1994 as the program manager for Knowledge-based Systems at DARPA in Washington DC. Gio maintains professional relationships in Europe, India and other Asian countries. He has been an advisor to CWI in the Netherlands, EPFL in Switzerland, GMD IPSI, TUM, and L3S in Germany, the KK Foundation in Sweden, and BT in the UK.

Wiederhold has authored and coauthored more than 300 publications and reports on computing and medicine, including an early popular Database Design textbook. Gio has been elected fellow of the ACMI, the IEEE, and the ACM. He has been an editor and editor-in-chief of several IEEE and ACM publications. Gio's web page is at http://www-db.stanford.edu/people/gio.html.