Article 3 of 7

Please observe hand-out A. To view handout A see link at end of article

This article is about a discussion of the new sophisticated health care system suggested in article 2. I am going to intentionally jump right into the middle of how the profile pattern such a system would be applied, so don't be concerned if you are unable to fit all the pieces of the system together immediately.

Hopefully this block diagram in handout A will help bring the 100 test profile pattern of health information more into perspective to give you a better idea as to the extreme breadth and depth of the information gathering capacity of this system. I might add here that the same laboratory (100 test) profile is used thorough-out the system--at both the national research center and the state diagnostic centers.

The top block diagram represents the 100 separate tests at five graduations each--approximately 100 dots across with five lines of dots representing the 5 possible test levels for each test.

Below this block, on the left side of page, you see the two block diagrams that represent the individual's health as well as environment. We know that any blood test taken reflects directly on our health and indirectly on our environment. This is represented on the far left with the dotted lines and arrows, showing that the blood tests reflect on both.

The vertical line extending from the bottom of the large 100-test block represents connection of the output of the 100 test profile pattern to both the research center (lower right) and the state diagnostic center.

In addition to the profile pattern test result information, the new medical research information system also needs to know just what the individual's actual physical environment and present health conditions are. In other words, just what is it physically that those 100 blood tests are actually representing, what are they testing? We will be discussing environmental issues shortly and we will come back and explain the environmental report data. As for the health data output, shown here, that will be information provided by the physician as the result of a physical examination, including patient and family health histories.

All of the data fed into the State Diagnostic Center and the National Research Center are provided by the physician's office"?including the results of the blood tests, the environmental report, and the patient's physical examination report.

Please note that this information, being all from one individual, is referred to as case #1 where it enters the National Research Center on the lower right hand section of the chart. The same information is fed into the state diagnostic center, but for now we will skip over that, and concentrate on the Research Center. Please note that on the bottom of the Research Center block diagram, there is also a line that represents a reflection of tens of millions of other cases of input. All of the above input information would be repeated tens of millions of times from tens of millions of individuals (The motivation needed for use of the system by individuals and patients is fully discussed in the book. There would be very strong motivation even in the early stages of the system).

Now, if you would, please refer to the far lower left-hand corner of the handout for a minute, in order to better understand why (and how) the 100 individual tests provide far more information than the 100 individual bits of data. Let's take a look at a situation that most of us are very familiar with. Among other considerations, common tests by our doctor during an office visit are body temperature and two blood pressure measurements. I have these three tests shown, drawn in at one of ten possible levels.

As an example let's say your body temperature was very high, at 106. Now that in itself would of course be very significant, but it would obviously not provide the doctor with enough information for an accurate diagnosis. Say we now bring the blood pressure tests into the picture, the doctor would also of course need to know what those specific test level results were. Now there are three test result levels involved and if the results of any one of the three vary significantly it could obviously affect the diagnosis"?of what our physical condition is. Most of us realize how important these test level results are. So, the diagnosis is, in effect, limited to the relationship of the individual test results to each other, which will be referred to for simplification as the "combination of the test results"?. We can see that each combination of test the level results would represent a certain health related condition, -- especially with the use of more tests.

Also, to illustrate the rapid buildup of test result data, it's difficult to believe, that mathematically we actually have 1000 possible combinations involved in this limited three test example. These are combinations that could be read by a computer for possible meaningful results. All 1000 combinations would not likely provide meaningful information and of course could be eliminated where it was shown that those particular combinations were of little or no value. However, one could expect a large percentage to be of significance, especially so if the computer were used to also correlate all of the possible results directly to human health conditions.

Above we can see the enormous information correlating capacityof the proposed system and how that capacity could provide dramatic health related results. It also compares that type of information evaluation directly to a typical doctor's office visit.