John Sculley has had a diverse career by any measure--he has served as president of PepsiCo, CEO of Apple (where he famously championed the tablet computer in the 1980s), and more recently, chairman of Watermark Medical, a medical products company that has developed an in-home sleep apnea diagnostic device). Sculley is also working with Audax Health Solutions, a startup that has developed a personal health management platform with a gamification layer that allows users to compete with friends and collect points and badges.
We caught up with Sculley at this year'sBody Computing Conference--an event that brings together doctors, designers, programmers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and members of the entertainment industry to preview the future of high-tech health care--to learn more about his thoughts on the future of health care technology.
Why are you interested in the high-tech health sector now?
I've been in high-tech now almost 30 years and I watched the health care industry miss the personal computer revolution and miss the Internet revolution. It's quite clear that the government and special interests aren't going to solve our health care costs to the economy and that [the sector] is ripe for innovation and disruptive approaches to shift the accountability more towards the patient, and to shift over time from reimbursements to outcomes. It's not going to happen by any one company, but I think there's enough opportunity to change the world of health care that it's attracting a lot of talent.
Why do you think health care missed out on the technology revolutions of the past and what are the factors coming together now to help it catch up?
I think first of all that it missed out on the PC and commercialized Internet revolutions because doctors are notorious for being late adopters to any kind of technology. The medical health care system is so complex and so institutionalized and there so many special interests that we now have the combination of a really aggregated problem that is touching the entire economy.
I think that a lot of credit has to be given to Apple, because previously when technologists were trying to address the health care industry with technology, they had to start from scratch and try to build unique devices. Well, Apple in less than two years with the iPad has revolutionized many industries, from media to music to games to all kinds of things and we're finding that doctors as well as patients feel very comfortable with the iPad as a platform technology. So the intimidation of technology is no longer the issue now that it was just a few years ago. The size of the problem is an order of magnitude larger than it was a decade ago. You combine those conditions and it creates an opportunity for entrepreneurs to come in and find disruptive solutions.