In this IBM Infomentary we asked Robert DeNoble, Principal at RDA Healthcare Consulting, his opinion on the future of entrepreneurs and innovation in the healthcare industry.

He says that healthcare is an area ripe for innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. Now, not only are we seeing entrepreneurs and small startups in the healthcare space, but we’re starting to see an entrepreneurial spirit emerge even within large companies.

Healthcare, says DeNoble, is close to being one-fifth of the US economy and is a large part of any industrialized nation’s economy, so it is essential that we have entrepreneurs who will disrupt in a major way the healthcare system as we know it. “We can’t afford not to,” he says.

DeNoble’s remarks capture the spirit of Startupbootcamp’s HealthXL launch tomorrow in London, a startup accelerator specifically designed to foster innovation in healthcare. Watch the HealthXL launch video and read more about it on our previous blog post.

These are also echoes of sentiments expressed–perhaps in a more controversial manner–by Vinod Khosla at Rock Health’s Health Innovation Summit. Khosla, whose remarks you can read more about in our previous blog Why Medicine is Like Witchcraft and What it Could Be, envisions a huge opportunity for innovation at the intersection of technology and human health, with changing technology enabling a doctor to “stop being a practitioner of voodoo medicine and be an intelligent scientist.” He even made the drastic assertion that 4 out of 5 of doctors can be replaced by software.

However, this assertion doesn’t seem so crazy when you consider technologies like IBM’s Watson, who is currently in “medical school” and has already ingested about 80% of the world’s medical data. It seems that we are entering into a new era of healthcare innovation and big data computing which will undoubtedly change the state of world health as we know it

Post written by Carolyn Rogers, IBM Worldwide Social Media Manager for ISV & Developer Relations.