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The projected pick-up in health care-related IT spending as well as general demographics shift of aging baby boomers has motivated vendors like Intel (News - Alert) to develop specialized prototype computers targeting the medical fields, according to published reports.

 

At a news conference in San Francisco on Monday, Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel's digital health group reportedly told members of the media the company plans to start large-scale testing hardware and software especially geared toward doctors, nurses and home hospice services later this year.

 

The Intel-hosted event follows the creation of the Silicon Valley Pay-for-Performance Consortium, a collaborative effort by Intel, Cisco Systems (News - Alert) and Oracle (News - Alert) that also includes medical groups and independent practice associations (IPAs). The consortium aims to accelerate the adoption of health care technologies by establishing standards that can reduce implementation costs while still ensuring the safe and secure transfer of information like patient records.

 

“The single largest spend on software is writing interfaces between proprietary systems," Burns is quoted as saying by eWeek. "That's insane in my book."

 

But a sticking point with initiatives such as the one outlined by Intel is identifying which party would bear the brunt of the costs: doctors, patients, insurance companies or employers. According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel isn't disclosing when such products will be ready or who would sell them.

 

A particularly poignant moment of the event came when Robert Pearl, a doctor who is chief executive officer of the Permanente Medical Group, which represents physicians in California affiliated with the big health-care provider Kaiser Permanente, described the death of his own father. Dr. Pearl cited the anecdote as an example that exchanging information is more difficult among the disparate computer systems used by independent doctors, testing labs, hospitals and insurers.

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.