Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree), Cisco’s CTO and until recently, one of the top candidates for America’s CTO position was recently interviewed on Technology Review. I recently watched her interview on Web 2.0 expo and could certainly tell that this is someone who is a real visionary, certainly someone to pay attention to. Some clips from her interview from MIT’s interview below.
TR: But how does more broadband installation boost the economy, beyond creating one-off construction jobs?
PW: There are many areas we can look at, such as modernizing health care with health-presence solutions–like a doctor from a remote area interacting with a patient who might not otherwise have access–and making the energy grid more efficient with smart-grid technologies. Collaboration, virtual networking, and visual communications will be the e-businesses of the next decade, and this will drive productivity. To do all of that, we need to have broadband connectivity nationwide.
Given my interest in using technology to help people (health care an obvious application), I thought this point was interesting. On a related note, there’s a new stimulus bill that mandates MDs to now electronic-ize all patient data, and most doctors don’t know how to navigate these techie waters.
To a techie, it’s quite amazing to see how health care is so .. for lack of a better word, backwards. Systems that don’t talk to each other creating separate data silos (in Web 2.0, data overlayed with other data creates even more richer data), programs written in MS-DOS (seriously?), and they still use the fax to transmit data (have you heard of this thing called the Internet?)
One of the ways entrepreneurs look for opportunities is to ask themselves, “What industry has not seen any innovation breakthroughs in a long time?” Paypal came about because the financial industry have remained stagnant for a long time prior to that. Health care is another area. And now with the stimulus/mandate in America .. it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing some creative software startups tackling this problem.
Tom Siebel (of Siebel Systems) has identified health care as one of the worlds largest looming problems, and will present an opportunity for not just good but GREAT companies to capitalize on.
