NATIONAL
COORDINATION OFFICE
FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
| For Immediate Release |
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Contact:
Carolyn Van Damme
703-292-4873
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President's
Information Technology Advisory Committee
Issues Three Groundbreaking Reports on
Healthcare, Learning and Digital Libraries
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The President's Information
Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) released three new reports
today as part of its follow-on series to the PITAC's February 1999
report, Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future.
These three reports take on two difficult issues of national importance,
health care and education. In these reports, Transforming Health
Care Through Information Technology; Digital Libraries: Universal
Access to Human Knowledge; and Using Information Technology To Transform
the Way We Learn, the PITAC offers recommendations for using
information technology to make health care, digital libraries and
learning more efficient, effective, and accessible.
In Transforming Health Care Through Information Technology
the PITAC offers six key recommendations that could significantly
expand access to health care, improve its quality, reduce its costs,
and transform the conduct of biomedical research. The PITAC sees
these recommendations as critical steps toward addressing the challenges
that exist to improving Americans' health and health care:
- Establish pilot
projects and Enabling Technology Centers to extend the
practical uses of information technology to health care
systems and biomedical research;
- NIH, in close
collaboration with NSF, DARPA, and DOE, should design
and deploy a scalable national computing and information
infrastructure to support the biomedical research community;
- Congress should
enhance existing privacy rules by enacting legislation
that assures sound practices for managing personally identifiable
health information;
- Establish programs
to increase the pool of biomedical research and health
care professionals with training at the intersection of
health and information technology;
- DHHS should outline
its vision for using IT to improve health care and subsequently
devote the resources to conduct the IT research critical
to accomplishing these goals in the long term; and
- DHHS should appoint
a senior information technology leader to provide strategic
leadership across DHHS and focus on the importance of
information technology in addressing pressing problems
in health care.
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PITAC members Sherrilynne
S. Fuller, Ph.D., Head, Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics,
Department of Medical Education, School of Medicine at University
of Washington and Edward H. Shortliffe, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and
Chair, Department of Medical Informatics, College of Physicians
and Surgeons at Columbia University, co-chaired the panel that authored
this report.
In the second report, Digital Libraries: Universal Access
to Human Knowledge, the Committee offers its findings and
recommendations for how digital libraries can be an essential resource
for human learning and development. The PITAC offers four key recommendations
that will make digital libraries more pervasive and usable by all
citizens:
- Expanded research
in metadata and metadata use, scalability, interoperability,
archival storage and preservation, intellectual property
rights, privacy and security, and human use
- Create several
Federally funded large-scale digital library testbeds
- Provide Federal
funding to make all public Federal content persistently
available in digital form on the Internet
- Have the Federal
government play a leadership role in evolving policy to
fairly address intellectual property rights in the digital
age
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The PITAC strongly believes
that these recommendations can help move this Nation toward realizing
the enormously powerful vision of anytime, anywhere access to the
best of human thought and culture, so that no classroom or individual
is isolated from knowledge resources.
PITAC member David Nagel, President, AT&T Labs, chaired the panel
that authored this report.
Using Information Technology to Transform the Way We Learn
highlights PITAC's findings and recommendations on how the Federal
government can provide the leadership needed to solve key information
technology challenges and to improve the quality of, and public
access to educational and training experiences. The overarching
recommendation in this report calls for the Federal government to
make the integration of information technology with education and
training a national priority. In addition, the Federal government
should:
- Establish and
coordinate a major research initiative for information
technology in education and training
- Establish focused
government-industry-foundation partnerships to aggressively
pursue the information technology research program
- Develop programs
that enable educators and related professionals to use
information technology effectively
- Work with industry
and academia to develop technical standards for extendable
component-based technologies and infrastructures that
can be widely used in online education and training
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PITAC members Susan L. Graham,
Ph.D., Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science at University
of California, Berkeley, and Andrew J. Viterbi, Ph.D., President,
The Viterbi Group, co-chaired the panel that authored this report.
The PITAC believes that the recommendations in these reports offer
this country a path to better harness the potential of information
technology, and bring the benefits of information technology to
its citizens. The PITAC, a body of top IT experts from private industry
and the research and education communities, advises the President
and the Office of Science and Technology Policy on all areas related
to high performance computing and communications and information
technologies. The Committee is co-chaired by Irving Wladawsky-Berger,
Vice President for Technology and Strategy for IBM's Enterprise
Systems Group, and Raj Reddy, Herbert A. Simon University Professor
of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
Copies of these reports can be obtained from the National Coordination
Office for Information Technology Research and Development at (703)
292-ITRD (4873) or via their website http://www.nitrd.gov. |
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