In the fall of 2005 I drove 55 miles southeast of San Francisco to spend a happy day at IBM’s labs at Almaden, where I met all manner of remarkable people and learned about the latest microprocessor and storage developments, but it was the last agenda item of the day that made the greatest impression. So much of an impression that it changed, fundamentally, the way I work.

If you want to understand the future of healthcare, a good place to start is with the past, and in particular the work of an amazing inventor who changed the world, Margaret Crane. One day in 1967 she was looking at pregnancy testing technology in the company she worked for when she had an epiphany …