(Former) Intel's Grove wants to "Shift Left"

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

PORTALS
By LEE GOMES

Andy Grove Enters New Post-Intel Role As Activist Capitalist
November 1, 2006; Page B1

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(Grove's) prescription is for medicine to "Shift left." The advice has nothing to do with the traditional political spectrum, though some of Mr. Grove's business chums do think that at 70 years old, he's going liberal on them. Instead, it involves applying lessons from the history of the computer industry that Mr. Grove himself helped write... Mr. Grove says he is alarmed by several structural issues involving health care in America, notably, the huge number of uninsured, who are often forced to get primary care in emergency rooms.

To explain "Shift left," Mr. Grove describes the bottom axis of a scale in which products and services grow more full-featured, complicated and expensive as you move to the right. To "Shift left" on this scale is to, in effect, "Keep it simple, stupid." Specifically, Mr. Grove is a big fan of low-cost, walk-in clinics, the sort beginning to appear in stores like Wal-Mart. He says they provide basic medical care for the uninsured, and also take some strain off of America's overloaded emergency rooms. But one thing missing from this emerging clinic infrastructure is a good system of medical record-keeping.

Mr. Grove, naturally, thinks technology can help. But rather than designing an elaborate and technically sophisticated medical-database system, something practically every tech company is now trying to do, Mr. Grove suggests the exact opposite. Shift left; keep the record of a patient's visit in, for example, a generic but Web-accessible word-processing file. Just like the early personal computer, it will be far from ideal, but it will be a start, and it can get better over time. The alternative, he says, is to wait endlessly for a perfect technology.

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Mr. Grove is involved in a political effort, too; it may indeed be his first fit of social activism. With venture capitalist John Doerr, he is helping fund FirstFreedomFirst.org, which is trying to collect a million signatures to support the First Amendment's separation of church and state. Some of the concerns of First Freedom First are, at least by the standards of Silicon Valley, safe ones, notably support for stem-cell research. Others are a little edgier, like the teaching of creationism and restrictions on reproductive health. This is where it gets personal. Mr. Grove has a mild form of Parkinson's, and his right hand often shakes as he talks. (He got nearly speechless with rage when describing the recent attacks on his friend and fellow Parkinson's sufferer, Michael J. Fox.)

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