Why are medical devices so bad?

Most people assume, wrongly that medical devices are well designed and put together by highly skilled engineers.

Sadly no. The opposite is true.

I enjoy helping my client Natus but they were a really hard account to grow. The problem is medical device engineers are petrified at the idea of making any significant improvements to their technology.

A small improvement results in a pile of compliance paperwork.

Just not that fun ;-)

It's not all bad from a business point of view - high regulatory hurdles make the technology really expensive - so Natus and other medical device technology companies sell smaller volumes of very high margin technology which is a long way from where it could be compared to a team executing via the theory of constrainst.

But the result is that sadly western medical technology is expensive and mediocre.

The 'bad guys' have better tech. But that's just a label.