iPads in Hospitals - Steve Jobs & the Pixar Connection
In an interesting Wired article on doctors and the iPad, Bob McMillan notes that Apple’s long-time interest in healthcare is surprising, since the company doesn’t make parallel efforts in other fields:
Why is healthcare the one vertical market that Apple promotes on its iPad apps for business page?
McMillan spends much of the long article telling the story of how Medical Market Manager and Evangelist Afshad Mistri has been Apple’s “secret weapon” in wooing the healthcare field to the iPad. Toward the end of the article, he goes further back in the story, and explores the question of why the roots of Apple’s healthcare involvement are so deep:
As with so many questions about Apple, the answer links to the late Steve Jobs. Apple’s founder was interested in medical technology long before he took ill. But one can’t help but wonder whether all that time in hospitals during his final years had some effect.
A central player in the story is Elliot Fishman, a professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins University. His roots with Apple and Jobs go back to Jobs’ early involvement with Pixar, when his first idea for Pixar’s pioneering tech was to apply it to medical imaging:
When Jobs acquired Pixar in the late 1980s, the company worked with Fishman and Johns Hopkins, trying to make a go of it in the medical imaging market. The project failed … [but] … Jobs took a personal interest in medical imaging back in the Pixar days, and he and Fishman stayed in touch through the years.
In the conclusion to the article, Fishman gets the last word, with the interesting suggestion that medical imaging is a haven for idealistic geeks:
Fishman can’t say if Jobs’ illness made him more interested in helping out doctors … But it’s not impossible to imagine that at a time when some are saying that Silicon Valley is no longer producing anything important, Apple believes that improving doctors’ lives might just be the right thing to do. There’s an intangible appeal that comes from making things better for sick people who are seeking help. “People in computer science are always interested in medical imaging,” Fishman says. “They always like to think that, you know, maybe Angry Birds is good but something medical might actually change the world.”
Details of the early Pixar-medical imaging story are in Wikipedia.
Note that this story is, surprisingly, not mentioned in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio … “One More Thing” :-)
