Intel is ramping its health care strategy with new hardware and software to help home-bound patients. Mobile giant Qualcomm has an array of new ideas for dis-aggregating today’s hefty, expensive, purpose-built machines that only do one or two things into a web of sensors, software, and wireless links. Think “body area network,” or BAN. Both companies are members of the Continua Alliance, a group of companies creating a “connected personal health ecosystem” of interoperable medical technologies.
This is just the type of medical innovation I wrote about in Friday’s Wall Street Journal — the kind that will transcend many of today’s debates about who is going to pay for the old system. My answer: Nobody will pay for the old system. Create a new system.
