“I recently visited a hospital in China with capacity for 6,000 people. The attention a patient there gets from the physician is 30 minutes a day. Then it hit me: we can not take care of the masses of people by building bigger hospitals; rather we need to develop remote technology for certain diseases like diabetes, hypertension, heart failure etc. " said Medtronic Inc. (NYSE: MDT) VP medicine and technology Steve Osterle MD, and the person in charge of the vision of the world’s largest medical instrumentation company. Osterle, an avid fan of Israel who visited here more than 15 times in the past 5 years, arrived this time to speak at the ICI Invasive Cardiology Conference which will open tomorrow in Tel Aviv. “Mine is a 20-year vision,” he said. “It will not happen overnight because there are still issues that need to be resolved such as the reliability of the information systems, encoding and access. But it will happen. Today, only 1 billion out of 7 billion people in the world have access to advanced healthcare. Fortunately for the medical instrumentation companies, the infrastructure for information transfer is available almost all over the world and we only need to supply the content and the software.”
