Web 2.0's "gigantic impact" on health care

>> How about Web 2.0? I'm not exactly sure how to find it, but I know that it came after Web 1.0, which was the Web we had where it was about putting up websites and now it's more about things like collaboration, social networking, Ajax interfaces, is that something that as a CIO at a large corporation that you think about at all?

>> I think if you're a CIO at a large, global corporation today and it isn't at least on your strategy and planning radar that you may want to wake up and smell the coffee. We are keenly interested in the velocity and the outcome of deployment of Web 2.0 in the United States, especially. Mostly because it offers the promise of drastically lower network operating costs and at the same time allows us to individually address an unlimited number of devices. When you think about what that means in health care, it means that you could be covered with sensors in your bed, in your shoes, in your room, and everyone of those devices are individually addressable and individually able to delivers its information to a caregiver without any network intervention or infrastructure other than carrying the messages. So in the product world and our infrastructure world it's going to have a gigantic impact.

>> So, RFID as a part of that whole issue of this next generation of the internet and having everything basically with its own URL that's passing everything back and forth. So from that point of view, are you developing tools, such as analytics that allow you to take that data and do something, given all the companies who you work with, to aggregate that data and try to extract some meaning from it?

>> We have some extensive data warehousing, business intelligence capabilities, largely around our pharmaceutical business because of the huge scale that that business operates, but in terms of aggregating the kind of information that we'll be able to acquire and use in a Web 2.0 world, that's years away and we're in the early planning stages of how we would approach that today.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====