When you compare it to those other verticals, do you agree with that widely held belief that healthcare seems to be behind the adoption curve for technologies?
It always is behind the curve, but I don’t like the word “behind.” The industry is naturally conservative. It’s not an industry like financial services where every second counts for making money. It’s more like education in that it’s not necessarily about taking risks in order to make a lot of money. It’s about people, too. Healthcare has a deliberate and conservative nature even though the industry uses some of the most advanced technology for medical equipment. How you make a hospital more productive, efficient and safe for the patients is not easy. A lot of the executives and CEOs of these hospitals are under a lot of pressure right now, especially because of all these cost structures that they have to go through.
Awarepoint and the industry that they are in is as exciting as heck. This is going to be a challenge going forward for us, but we need to show that if you deploy this technology, that within the year you will be seeing results. If you don’t have that then, well, the technology is great–sounds great–but you really need to see those benefits.
Has the national healthcare conversation and the stimulus dollars around electronic health records helped Awarepoint? Do you think it will?
I have asked that same question at the board meetings so the company executives may be better positioned to answer that, but my suggestion to Jason is why aren’t you more aggressive in pursuring those government dollars. I know IBM an HP and others have been. Well, we are one level below a lot of the healthcare IT world in that a lot of the data we generate feeds into those IT systems. We are a small company but I think we either need to go get some of that money or work on projects with some of the bigger companies to really demonstrate to the government and other companies that this technology should be included. It’s a great time for a company like Awarepoint to leverage into some of this.
The big focus in tech right now is health IT and electronic medical records, which, by the way, I would love to have on a system in the cloud, protected and secured so doctors around the world could have access to that information. Paperwork [for current medical records] is just amazing. That’s where a lot of the lobbying efforts have been. When I used to be on the Tech CEO Council, we used to go down to Washington D.C. with HP, IBM, Dell and Intel to lobby about all this.
In hospitals a lot of the information that Awarepoint generates, which is real-time tracking of everything in the hospital including whether patients are being taken care of properly. If you are a hospital executive you could track your cycles time. With this data everything that’s going on in your hospital can effectively be tracked from a real-time dashboard. I don’t think hospitals have good dashboards now. Years ago, all of us at the well-run Fortune-class companies went to these real-time dashboards. When I was at Sun or Motorola I could see at any hour of any day what business we were booking, how much we shipped, what the supply chain was looking like. That’s why we have these big, efficient companies. If we can move that enabling technology for tracking assets and everything else that moves within a hospital, I think we could team with some of these [EMR] players and become a supplier for the next generation of their offerings.
Do you think that this consumer wireless health market is a big opportunity?
I do, I definitely do, but whether Awarepoint fits into that isn’t clear yet. When I was at Motorola we were already checking out people’s hearts, pulse and all kinds of things in other countries. We were making sure they were taking their medications and all sorts of things like that. I think the bigger thing is that if broadband is everywhere and is cost effective in the next three to five years, we can safely and accurately tag every asset or any object and do something useful with that information. There are companies working on that for every industry and even for consumer uses, but right now we are small so we will keep our focus on healthcare. I want us to own every hospital and make sure they all have Awarepoint’s system.
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