Who isn't trying to get into healthcare these days?
IBM has touted several supercomputing wins with drug discovery firms and created a group focusing on health care technology. Similarly, Intel is working with a research institute to see if semiconductor equipment can detect the onset of cancer. It also has devised baby monitor systems.
Anyone whose eyes have popped out reviewing a medical bill knows why. Health care costs in the US have skyrocketed, and medicine has remained somewhat resistant to giving up pens and paper for computers — think of those paper charts in hospital rooms. The worldwide graying of the population, combined with longer life spans, means a system will have to be created that lets patients send in vital statistics remotely.
Louis Burns, who once ran Intel's desktop group, manages the company's Digital Health Group, formed earlier this year. Intel hasn't had much success to date in branching out beyond PCs and servers. In a recent interview, though, Burns laid out the case why, conceivably, you could see "Intel Inside" on a chilly medical instrument coming at you one day.
Q: Why are the costs so outrageous in health care? Is it an inefficient system? Weren't HMOs supposed to straighten this out?
A: There are a lot of reasons for that, and it is all over the map. What we've had to do is look at places where they have done a pretty good job of it. Kaiser [Permanente] has got a pretty interesting integrated system. Kaiser is a provider and a buyer. They have very clear motivations for improving the overall quality of care, of improving safety for patients, and in lowering the cost. Where the payer and provider are integrated, like at the VA or national health system, it is much easier to go about lowering the costs.
Now I'm not suggesting that the US adopt a nationalised or socialised concept, but in those places [where such systems exist] they made pretty good progress in some cases.
If you look in the US at most of the non-teaching hospitals, they have a percent-and-a-half margin. They run a pretty tight budget. There are examples above and below that, but they don't have huge amounts of money to spend. And, quite frankly, probably a more visible thing to do is buy a new MRI machine or a new ward rather than make the hospital wireless or improve the nurses' efficiency by 20 percent. So there are a bunch of issues.
Now if you look at our industry, the technology industry spent more money and time improving first-person shooter games than the outcome in the emergency room. Think about that for a second. What we're really trying to...
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