John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple and Pepsi, and also health technology investor, gave his view on healthcare inequality and how smartphones could maybe build more equality and healthcare access in developing countries. We interviewed him at the Digital Health Live conference in Dubai today, where he spoke about the future of healthcare.

As former CEO of Apple and Pepsi (1977-1983), John Sculley knows brands. But Sculley is now talking about looking beyond the brand.

Before, big brands were everything–but now, customers are better informed with different tools. He is now interested in how big data is changing customer decision making.

Recommendations from machine learning systems and previous customers are guiding consumer behavior.

Simultaneously, the companies are able to use big data to target their customers more efficiently.

Sculley is interested in the disruptive innovation that happens at the intersection during the information era.

“Healthcare Missed the Digital Revolution”

When it comes to healthcare and data, there is room for optimisation: “Only 20% is evidence-based medicine that physicians apply, so it’s increasingly about the data”.

Healthcare needs to make more use of the data that is out there. At Digital Health Live 2015, Sculley says that billions of devices will be connected to the Internet Of Things by 2020  (Morgan Stanley mentions that it could be as much as 75 billion devices). But most of the connections will be machine-to-machine and not connected to people directly.

The smartphone is a channel to deliver healthcare information to places never before possible. For example, small information snippets can radically alter the healthcare statistics around birth and pregnancy.

Those billions of connected devices are not equally distributed, and the question will be about how to best extract valuable insights and deliver the information to where it is most needed.