Burns: Yeah, there is a cultural aspect of this. They're highly motivated people for the most part that are in that business because, one could argue, they feel strong about what they are doing. Oftentimes when new things are thrown at them and they don't see the benefit, they'll say, "I don't want to deal with that. I am trying to take care of patients. I am not trying to learn how to use these new systems."
Does Intel have to work with an entirely new set of equipment manufacturers, or is this the kind of market where you can team up with Dell or Hewlett-Packard?
Burns: It depends on the business. There are a lot of hospitals trying to figure out how to automate. They will buy servers and clients and stuff, and they buy those from the traditional customers. There are some new players we are not ready to talk about yet.
Burns: We already do that in some systems. If they can get more standards there, it's going to be more feasible. Standardisation would allow more equipment to be deployed. If you go to a community hospital, they should have access to the same things a teaching hospital does. We're talking to the bigger players in that space: GE, Philips, Siemens.
How do you evangelise yourself in the medical community? Are you teaming up with key hospitals or the pharmaceutical community?
Burns: We're doing all that. We've been nine months quiet. St. Louis (KC) hospital is an example of that. They have RFID (radio frequency identification) tracking, and why is it important? I don't know if you've ever been in the hospital and tried to find somebody. They should be able to tell you at the front desk, "He's down in MRI and will be back in 30 minutes, so why don't you go to the cafeteria and we will call you when he's back in his room?"
There's a guy in our office who recently kept setting off the alarms in a maternity ward by standing too close to the elevator with his new baby. The baby had an RFID tag.
Burns: Right, and that's a simple integration of technology. We run massive amounts of RFID in our factories today. If you put the RFID in patient bracelets -- now they have bar codes -- you don't have to move the patient to get near it.
You've shown off prototype tablets for conducting rounds. What sort of feedback are you getting from doctors and nurses with those devices?
Burns: Those are wooden models.
So they aren't real?
Burns: They are really wooden. What we did is, we went and talked with doctors and nurses at hospitals and conducted focus groups. Then we came up with something and had them look at it...Is it too big? Is the bar code scanner in the right place? Then they'll ask questions like, "What if I lose it?"
We have a new version that has an integrated keyboard that has nine or 12 symbols that medical professionals understand. We're tweaking form factors, doing things like that. The people who are going to use it are going to be an active part of designing it.
Once we get it figured out pretty good, we will build a reference design and let the industry go at it.
How far away before the product hits the market -- two, three years?
Burns: It won't be that far out.
The prototypes you are showing look pretty small. Are they based around a regular Intel chip or an XScale?
Burns: You could do something with a Yonah or a Merom (two upcoming notebook chips). You want that horsepower and that capability. People want something small. But they have done some experiments with PDAs (personal digital assistants), and PDAs are too small. You don't want to just input data. It's not like UPS forms.
They also want things like voice recognition. Let's say you're a doctor and you've written an order, and a nurse captures it (on a tablet) and then says, "Dr. Kanellos, can you approve that order?" Or let's say I walk into your room, it picks up your RFID bracelet, and I get a good understanding of what is going on.
We all know the health care system in America can drive people nuts. How is it in the rest of the world?
Burns: We were at a Pacific Health Summit in Seattle that Lee Hartwell (Nobel laureate and president of the Fred Hutchinson Institute) organised. The phrase that came out of that was that talking about the U.S. health care system is like talking about my (hypothetical) brother. "I know he's a jerk, and I know I have to deal with him, but when you talk bad about him I am going to defend him." That is what you see in the U.S. health care system.
Is one better than the other? I don't know. The (British) NHS is a very a cool system in some respects. But for some reason, there is a second system that is developing in the U.K. where you can take out private insurance and pay to get to see the doctor sooner.
4%
2%
