In a keynote address Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel"s Digital Health Group, formed just nine months ago, laid out for an audience of high-tech hardware and software developers the benefits of Intel"s imminent leap into the health care market.

However much good Intel can bring to an industry that many say is at least a generation, if not two, behind in high-tech developments, Burns left no doubt why the giant chipmaker is targeting health care. He went through a litany of population trends that indicate health care will become a huge buyer of high-tech equipment over the next 20 years and beyond.

The population of the United States and the world is aging rapidly, with estimates that 21 percent of the global population will be over 60 years old by 2050, Burns said. China alone has on the drawing board the construction of 3,000 new hospitals. And in the United States 15 percent of the gross domestic product is spent on health care; estimates are that it will grow to 25 percent in 20 years.

"We can"t afford to spend US$1 in every $4 on health care," Burns said. "The system has to change."

Intel"s goal is to apply technology to improve global health care, Burns continued. He added that this represents an opportunity for growth to the high-tech industry and then went on to talk about some of the unique solutions that Intel and others are currently working on to improve health care services.

With wireless monitoring devices, for example, a heart attack patient might be sent home earlier from the hospital with less chance of coming back. With the right telemetry, a doctor could measure the patient for adherence to exercise programs and taking medication.

The most dramatic use of wireless for in-home care that Burns cited was Intel"s work with subjects living with Parkinson"s disease. After Intel employees spent time living in 100 households where one member of the family was suffering with the disease they were able to design three unique devices. Rather than a patient coming in to the doctor"s office on a monthly, or sometimes even yearly, basis, the devices were able to measure the progress of the disease on a daily basis.

A standard Parkinson"s test to see how quickly a patient can place pegs from left to right into a peg board was linked to the computer, giving more accurate measurements of tremors than a visual observation, and results were sent to the doctor.

"It captured ten times more information and it had millisecond accuracy," Burns noted.

The second device has the patient say "ahh" into a microphone and then measured the energy of the voice. This device might some day be embedded in a cell phone.

The third device measures medication dosage and can deliver more or less medication depending on the patient"s response, such as a reduction in the severity of tremors.

These devices may spawn a new field of devices to measure behavioral markers and can also be used in the cases of stroke and Alzheimer"s victims.

Patient safety in the hospital is another major concern of health care practitioners, with almost 96 percent of all accidental deaths in hospitals attributable to giving patients the wrong medications.

"There are 100,000 preventable deaths due to mistakes in ordering [medications]," Burns said, noting that electronic ordering that is mapped to a patient will greatly reduce errors.

Burns also talked of a premature baby born weighing 300 grams with the documentation growing along with the infant to the extent that when the baby weighed 600 grams six weeks later the folder next to the crib measured sixteen inches thick with medical records.

In bringing its considerable research and development expertise to the problem of improving the health care of an aging population, Burns continually stressed the need for standardization in both software and hardware.

"The single biggest software expense in health care is the proprietary software used to connect proprietary applications to other proprietary applications," burns continued.

The audience noticed that for the most part all high-tech firms have a similar business model to Intel that depends on standardization to create volume sales. This does not yet exist in health care and would be needed for Intel and other high-tech companies not now in healthcare to be successful in this market.

Burns also noted that in intensive care units that are wired, by which he meant using wireless devices to monitor patients, there is a 7 percent lower mortality rate.

He demonstrated a pilot device that includes a Bluetooth-enabled stethoscope, blood pressure, and oxygen monitor with built in VoIP capabilities.

He also had wheeled out a COW (computer on wheels), which nurses or doctors could use as a link in a personal area or local area network to send data back to a nurse"s station or even to send an alert to the patient"s doctor who may not be in the hospital. Not only would real-time data be sent to health care providers but equally important trend lines -- like a spike in blood pressure or temperature, which indicates changes in the patient"s status -- would be transmitted, as well.

The Intel executive also took the time to promote Intel"s drive to make WiMax the standard for wireless communications. Burns said all hospitals in a city could be connected via WiMax to share information.

The keynote ended when Burns brought to the stage Dr. Lee Hartwell, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine and the president of the Fred Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle. Dr. Hartwell said what he would like to see come from high tech are standardization for the collection of data and for patient records.