That Really Work . Together, these ideas form an important focus of modern medical informatics.
Health care is a remarkably information intensive activity.
For if patients are to take more responsibility for their healthcare, they and their care providers need easy access to person-specific records and health information. Telemedicine and telehealth services will need to deliver services to the point of need, which will be where people live and work. Meeting the challenge of providing these services using public data networks, while protecting individuals' privacy and security, is where many of 1997's most creative and intriguing new developments in Internetable' Health Care will occur. For users to accept innovative new information systems, they must see that the new system is truly better than the method it replaces. Proving that one has truly done something worth doing with information technology generally means that evaluation has been part of a design from its inception, and not an afterthought.