For the past decade there has been a major push in the United States and elsewhere to improve Healthcare quality by reducing treatment-related mistakes that occur in various Healthcare settings. Some researchers have estimated that up to or more than 100,000 people die in the United States due to errors in treatment that could have been prevented. Intelligent Healthcare is first and foremost, a philosophical premise or doctrine. This doctrine is founded upon the realization that traditional Healthcare practice and Healthcare IT support or enablement are now and will be forever be intertwined or dependent upon one another. Furthermore, this doctrine recognizes that these elements are bound to a single purpose and common outcome – to successfully provide care to patients – both individual patients and the larger patient population as a whole.    

The figure below illustrates Intelligent Healthcare as philosophical framework built around Patient outcomes. A major part of what IH seeks to accomplish is the ability to design to a specific sets of patient outcomes – or ‘patient-focused’ performance engineering. This requires developers and practitioners to take extra steps to determine just how a particular new capability fits into existing processes, how it works with existing systems and how it can be adopted within this environment or context to deliver improved outcomes.