Recently, I was having lunch with a Twin Cities lawyer who complained that he was quite frustrated that the public has such a negative view of medical devices.
He couldn’t understand why intense focus was on the few medical devices that have failed compared to the innumerable ones that sustain life every day in millions of people globally.
Of course, I gave him my stock answer — one he knew too well. That it’s precisely because they are life-saving, that people’s tolerance for failure is low. It’s not like your cable service failing or a malfunction with your smartphone.
But my answer masks the real issue.
The truth is that the medical device industry has preferred to talk to doctors rather than patients. And this lack of communication with the end customer is no longer tenable in an information age where powerful currents of mhealth and healthcare reform are challenging the status quo.
The goal of the industry is lofty: to create devices that sustain and enhance the quality of life. While the goal is noble and includes the patient, the methodology excludes them because device makers try to understand the patient’s needs vicariously through physicians.
The demands of the profession require doctors to be largely free of emotion. But by aligning so closely to physicians, these life-saving medical devices end up being as colorless and bereft of emotion as a doctor’s lab coat. The stark white/gray MRI machine or CT scanner might as well blend into the walls of a hospital or imaging center.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Do these products really need to be so lifeless?
I never even considered the matter until I heard a talk by Jon Polhamus, manager, Brand & Design Language at GE Healthcare Global Design. Polhamus was a speaker at a session of the Design of Medical Devices Conference organized by the University of Minnesota in early April.
He talked about how the engineers and product designers are deeply passionate people and yet their passion gets stripped from the products they build. He said device makers need to infuse humanity into the design processes and incorporate storytelling to make the experience of using a medical device much richer.
And what Polhamus says make sense — storytelling has been part of the human experience since language evolved. Remember how Scheherzerade escaped death by telling a new story every night to the Sultan Shahryar in “Arabian Nights”?
How do medical device makers incorporate storytelling? How does it work in practical terms? Polhamus has some ideas.
Think of a sick child who needs an MRI or CT scan. How scary is going to a hospital and climbing into one of those machines? In fact, doctors often sedate children to get a good image.
So, GE Healthcare imagined a world where getting a diagnostic scan would become an adventure instead.
They designed this CT scanner for children. The story that parents can tell a child is that they are going to explore a coral city where the yellow submarine is going to go through the coral reef.
Parents can explain, “Stay very still, otherwise you are going to bump the coral reef,” Polhamus said.
A GE Healthcare spokesman said that the Coral City CT scanner is part of the Adventure Series and was developed in partnership with Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, a hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The hospital had set a goal of reduced sedation rates and through the use of this distraction method, was able to achieve that goal. Scroll down here to read the comments of a hospital administrator of pediatric radiology, Kathleen Kapsin, about the GE partnership.
The same human emotion is at play in another GE device in development, said Polhamus. This design is intended to calm a person undergoing diagnostic imaging and provide an alternative to staring at a blank white surface. Polhamus showed what appeared to be the inside of a imaging machine that looked like an intricate painting of swans. Patients would see this work of art when lying down. (The GE Healthcare spokesman was unable to dig up a photo, and I didn’t think to snap a photo when Polhamus was displaying the product.)
I am not saying that device makers need to make pacemakers in all colors of the rainbow, but infusing humanity and imagination into these devices might change the narrative about devices.
I have lived long enough in the U.S. to know that if people imagine something, they can make it happen.
After all, some people have a religious devotion to their iPhones. Shouldn’t they love their cardiac devices too?
