Proceedings of the 29th Annual International

Conference of the IEEE EMBS

SaD10.2
Cité Internationale, Lyon, France
August 23-26, 2007.

Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare, its Opportunities and

Challenges
Yongmin Kim, Fellow, IEEE and Eung-Hun Kim

Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare (D2H2) has been proposed as a new healthcare delivery framework in the 21st
century. The goal of D2H2 is to improve quality of care and patient wellness and outcomes by transforming the delivery of
healthcare from a central, hospital-based system to one that is more distributed, patient-centered and home-based. D2H2 has
potentials to benefit patients by improving the quality and convenience of care, controlling healthcare cost, and preventing
medical errors, thus leading to increased access to affordable and effective healthcare.

In the 1st Transdisciplinary Conference on D2H2 in 2006, leaders from industry, academia and government participated in
active discussion with more than 200 participants to exchange ideas and to discuss various aspects of issues and
opportunities associated with realization of the D2H2, including the current status, important components/ingredients, their
enabling technologies, and policies. Also, it is important to understand how this transformation might take place as well as
the technical and non-technical challenges involved. Due to the complexity and scope of D2H2, collaboration between
researchers, engineers, and providers from many traditional disciplines will be essential in order to overcome the potential
obstacles and realize the full potential benefits of D2H2.

We believe that the D2H2 paradigm, with all the stakeholders working together toward the common and societal good, will
aid in developing a sustainable 21st-century healthcare system with the potential to improve accessibility to healthcare,
increase care quality, and control healthcare costs, not only in the developed countries but also in the developing countries.
This presentation will summarize the opportunities and challenges in D2H2.

1-4244-0788-5/07/$20.00 ©2007 IEEE 6150