by Jamie Hartford
When I was asked to think about how physicians will be affected by the changes in the medtech industry over the next 5–10 years, I initially thought “not much.”
The field of medicine is a slow-moving beast with substantial inertia. Physicians tend to be quite conservative when treating patients for a number of reasons. Many physicians practice the way they were trained, which may have been a number of years ago, despite the continuing medical education requirements to maintain state licenses. Moreover, physicians may be liable if a bad outcome results from treatment that deviates too far from the current standard of care, so they may be reluctant jump on the latest trends in treatment, no matter how promising they seem. And the very first oath a future physician takes when entering medical school is Hippocrates’s, promising to “do no harm,” which often means “watchful waiting.”
