Ex-Apple CEO forecasts tech-driven change in medicine

John Sculley wasn't responsible for building Apple ($AAPL) into today's tech superpower. Much credit for that goes to the late Steve Jobs. Yet Sculley has been close to the pulse of technological changes for nearly 30 years, and his instincts about the course of tech-driven transformation in healthcare and medicine are worth noting.

Sculley, a 73-year-old investor, believes that cloud computing and big data analytics have the potential to solve some of the largest problems in healthcare, including mounting costs, The Guardian reported. Sculley now invests in companies focused on healthcare and serves as a venture capitalist, a job that involves placing bets on outfits that are ahead of their time.

He sees the dramatic drop in the cost of computing and the growing capacity to analyze huge amounts of data as two major factors in medicine.

"I'm working with a company right now where we're doing this--you can track in real time people's vital signs and take that data, you can imagine that's massive amounts of data when you're tracking each individual in real time, the vital signs--it could be their heart, could be how much they weigh, could be their fluid retention, could be even tracking proteomics, which are protein changes inside the body," Sculley said, as quoted by The Guardian.

Sculley was pushed out after a 10-year stint as CEO of Apple in 1993, according to Wikipedia. After his departure, Jobs led the company and introduced such products as the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Before his death last year, Jobs took a keen interest in biotech and predicted that the convergence of tech and biology would have a major impact in the coming decades, according to Walter Isaacson's biography about Jobs.

- check out The Guardian's article