Smart Health and Wellbeing

which estimated that preventable medical errors lead to as many as 98,000 deaths per year in the US.2 Gerard Anderson and Patricia Markovich also reported that the US spends $1.7 trillion annually (16 percent of GDP) on healthcare, yet produces signi! cantly lower health outcomes than many other developed countries.3 Many new government initiatives to improve this situation have been started recently. For example, President Obama’s $787 billion federal stimulus package was announced in 2009. In it, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act for healthcare information technology (IT) stipulates that healthcare entities in the US need to use IT to ! x ingrained problems, with $50 billion allocated to this effort over the next ! ve years and $19 billion in 2011 alone. Similarly, China’s government announced a plan in January 2009 to spend more than $120 billion on the ! rst phase of a 10-year overhaul of its healthcare system.4