SANTA BARBARA, California -- Despite balmy weather and a warm reception by the audience at the Operating Room 2000 conference on Thursday, Microsoft senior researcher and microprocessor pioneer Gordon Bell was in no mood to mince words about the state of medical technology.
"You are where the auto industry was about 20 years ago," he scolded the surgeons, medical products company reps, and hospital executives gathered to hear about state-of-the-art operating room technology. "I asked one of the medical device manufacturers what it would take to add a plug to make their product compatible (with another product on display) and he said 'About $2,000.' That's bullshit."
Bell said medical device manufacturers have resisted interconnectivity to competitors' devices because they're worried that they'll lose their share of the health-care pie.
"Everybody in the (medical device business) finds their own island, and then they milk the people who have to buy the products," said Bell in his speech. "Everybody is trying to gain proprietary advantages that lock in their own customers."
The lack of standards among medical device manufacturers -- and the health-care business' slowness to go online -- hurts everybody, Bell maintained. Patient care suffers when machines can't pass information to each other and when their own medical information isn't readily available to them. Doctors suffer because they can't get timely medical information; and health-care providers suffer because the lack of interconnectivity drives up the cost of delivery.
The solution -- "IP (Internet Protocol) on everything" -- said Bell, stating that medical equipment should have the same degree of interoperability and intelligence that people have come to expect from office equipment and home PCs.
If there's a bitter edge to Bell's keynote, it's because of personal experience. A few years ago, his wife was in the hospital for treatment of a serious medical condition, and he spent frustrating days trying to get information and watching her suffer in the care of machines that weren't properly networked.
Today "a part of her brain is missing," he said. And he blames the experience, or some of it, on the current state of med-tech. He also believes he could have been spared at least one of his heart attacks if he had been connected to a device that could be worn on the chest and directly linked to a heart doctor.
