^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Another Telecosm Bit: Health Care

Another thought from our Telecosm conference last week: We had a couple very good presentations on health care from Andy Kessler and Art Robinson. Kessler’s new book, The End of Medicine, focuses on advances in digital imaging, as we go from single “slice” CT scans to 4 to 16 to 64, 256, 1024, down the line. The scanners are getting faster, higher resolution, and can now create 3D images. These things put out enormous amounts of data. The new ones yield around 2 gigabytes (GB), or about as much as a full-length DVD movie. Read just a bit about these marvelous new technologies, and one thing radiologists say over and over is that the data storage and bandwidth problems associated with all this output are significant. We’re going to need huge new telecom and datacom capacity if we are going to handle and fully exploit these new technologies that have the real possibility of making us all much healthier.
-Bret Swanson