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Virtualizing Health And Disease
Roland Piquepaille writes "In "'Dr. Data' Digitizes Medical Care," Karen Southwick says that "David Eddy's Archimedes software dares to turn human heartbeats into the ones and zeros of the digital age -- and, just maybe, the nation's healthcare system on its ear." It sounds pretty ambitious, so let's look at some details. David Eddy has built a complex software program he calls Archimedes, named for the ancient Greek mathematician who boasted he could move the world with a single lever. The software model, for the first time in medical history, uses mathematical algorithms and equations to translate the beat of a heart or the twitch of a muscle into the ones and zeros of the Digital Age, replicating in numbers the behavior of a disease and creating a "virtual reality" in which patients, providers and institutions interact as they would in the real world. Southwick also wrote a companion story, "How Archimedes Works," which gives more technical explanations about this software developed by the Biomathematics Unit of Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute. Check this column for a summary of these two articles."
The timeline covers all domains, not just medical, but there's lots of related sims, and medical models going back to 800 BC.