Intel's Craig Barrett takes medical vision to Davos

BBC RADIO FOUR'S Today programme interviewed Intel chairman Craig Barrett this morning on a most crackly line, and as he headed out to Davos which is in Helvetia.

Barrett is attempting to persuade the world+dog that Intel can be a great force for good in the world and in particular he wants to revolutionise the health care business which he believes is one of the last redoubts that has failed to grasp IT to its bosom.

Tell us about it Craig. The NHS is currently engaged on a mega expensive attempt to intro IT which is so far notable for not very much at all.

Craig thinks that if the medics adopted IT as it could, it would make life a whole lot easier for everyone, including the poor long suffering patients. One example - everyone could carry around a USB stick with her or his medical data on it, so that - f'rinstance, if she or he had been wheeled into a hospital and fed an anticlogging agent after a heart attack, the next time it happened the A&E department wouldn't try and flush the system with the cheapo one that you can only use on a patient once.

Such a stick would contain lots of other useful data for the quacks to have a dekko. Asked whether his vision was just a way to sell more chips to more people, Barrett stoutly defended his corner, pointing out that Intel had already implemented many public spirited schemes to train up teachers, to encourage kids at school, and the like.

We guess the USB would have to be Windows compliant. We know that until recently, some British hospitals were still using the BBC Micro. We recall in the halcyon days of a spring Intel Developer Forum in Palm Springs, myself and a South African hack were shown a technique to winkle out defects in transistors at a sub-micron level. This, as my colleague pointed out, could easily be applied to certain surgical techniques.

Intel won't be holding a spring Developer Forum in America this year. µ

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