The list is a useful starting point for your job or internship search, particularly if you are interested or need to stay within your state.  It can be used to determine whether there are any large medical device corporations with a presence in your state.  It can also be used to find telephone numbers, addresses and websites of the smaller companies. You will need to get up the courage to call these potential contacts and introduce yourself to them. Its the only way to find out when a local company is thinking of hiring and what they are looking for. Use this approach in addition to applying over the internet.

Please contact me if you wish to obtain a list which has been filtered to contain only manufacturers,  remanufacturers, specification, etc. for any state.  Contact Form

As a product development engineer the publication provides me with some insights into how the medical community expects to use genetic information and potentially provides clues to new products and product features for my company.  The information in the document provides several more pieces of knowledge that can be used to help predict what the future medical device market for genetics based products may be in 2014 and beyond.

Using my own pattern recognition system I found one interesting item that pops up is the need to interpret expression microarrays and panels of tests.  This will be a daunting task given the considerable increase in data that the physician will have at hand to interpret.  Information overload is already a problem and would seem to be poised to get worse.   Technical solutions that make use of the minds ability to identify patterns and the doctor’s training to look for them could be one potential technical path to helping make sense of all the information.  Too fully develop this approach there would be a need to become comfortable with the psychological and technical aspects of pattern recognition in the human brain,  and marry this knowledge with the typical diagnostic methods doctor’s use on a day to day basis.   I would imagine that government sponsored research research on addressing information overload may be useful.  It also requires a knowledge of the challenges facing the typical medical practitioner on a day to day basis.

One attempt to solve one of the issues of interpreting large amounts of genetic data may be instructive.

See Making Gene Expression Data Useful To The Clinician

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in addressing the issues described in this post Contact

Start here: Overview of Device Regulations

Then here:

Quality Systems Regulation (QSR)/Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)

Interviewing skills are important because one of the most important things an engineer, particularly novice engineers, can do is get into the field and learn about the customers needs. It provides them a chance to “walk in the shoes” of their customer by watching, observing, and asking questions. There are entire academic fields devoted to the subject of asking questions to people. Although many retail based corporations typically have market research departments devoted strictly to finding out what customers think about their products or needs most medical device corporations tend to rely on their medical affairs personnel, sales representatives and product development engineers to gather it. The reason appears to be that each medical field is represented by a relatively small group of medical professionals with a specific set of needs. The result is that at some point the engineer will need to know how to obtain information from these professionals. But what type of questions should they ask?

Generally speaking there are two types of questions closed ended questions and open ended questions. Closed ended questions can generally be answered with a yes or no or a fact ( number, time of day, etc.) Closed ended questions require the engineer to either know what they want to ask or guess what might be important to the customer. They are useful if the engineer has identified a technical or customer issue and wants to verify it. They are the verbal equivalent of a microscope. They can miss the forest for the trees. Open ended questions can not be answered with a yes or a no. They don’t require the engineer to be particularly knowledgeable about the field although they will need to be familiar with medical vocabulary and concepts to get the most out of them. They are great for getting the lay of the land. They are the verbal equivalent of observing the customer at a distance while they perform their job.

So when do should an engineer use each? Stay tuned for the next post on this subject.

The list is a useful starting point for your job or internship search, particularly if you are interested or need to stay within your state.  It can be used to determine whether there are any large medical device corporations with a presence in your state.  It can also be used to find telephone numbers, addresses and websites of the smaller companies. You will need to get up the courage to call these potential contacts and introduce yourself to them. Its the only way to find out when a local company is thinking of hiring and what they are looking for. Use this approach in addition to applying over the internet.

Please contact me if you wish to obtain a list which has been filtered to contain only manufacturers,  remanufacturers, specification, etc. for any state.  Contact Form

A first step toward such a tool has been developed by Gabriel Eichler, Ying Feng, Yuchun Guo and Sui Huang in the Ingber laboratory at the Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. The Gene Expression Dynamics Inspector (GEDI) approach uses color patterns related to gene expression results to convey the gene expression “state” of a patient. The concept relies heavily on the doctor’s ability to detect visual patterns and correlate them with the other tools at their disposal to create a diagnosis.  From the product development point of view its clear that the creators of this software understood their customer and developed a tool that would be within their capabilities to use. The technology is available to the public without charge.

The attempt to create this type of tool highlights the need and the challenges that the medical industry and its engineers will face to create products that simplify the interpretation of the volume of data made available by genomic techniques and make them useful to the clinician.

See Gene Expression Dynamics Inspector

Here is a more traditional approach for reporting clinical data as a result SNP genetic testing of a patient to a clinician.
Understanding Navigenics Results

See VISTA Receives Harvard Award for Innovation

As a result of the emphasis on Healthcare Information Management a rethinking about how the Biomedical Engineering / Clinical Engineering Department relate to the Information Technology Department is occurring.  Their increasingly interdependent nature is causing some hospitals the BMET Department is becoming part of the Information Technology Department.  This is quite a change from the current management structures that are in place which generally place the Biomedical Engineering/Clinical Engineering Departments under Maintenance Department or Operations.  In every hospital it has created the need for IT specialists within the BMET department that can work at the technical and organizational interface between IT and medical hardware.

Clearly the growing trend to integrate medical data from clinical equipment is also impacting corporate strategies for new products.  A common business strategy to exploiting a new technology is to find ways to develop proprietary systems which force the hospital to standardize on the corporation’s products.  Often that means proprietary data structures and communications protocols for and between equipment made by the corporation.  However, the national mandate for the development of a national Electronic Health Record system requires interoperability to work.  This is because one of the major reasons for a national EHR is to reduce medical errors as a result of poor transcription of, or incomplete knowledge of a patient’s medical history. ( drug interactions, allergies, etc.).  With an electronic health record in place for every U.S. citizen medical errors due to transcription errors, drug interactions, etc. become considerably less likely particularly when the patient finds themselves ill or injured when away from home.  The current state of affairs provides fertile ground for innovation as engineers attempt to meet patient safety, business and government/patient requirements.

See Biomeds Join the Party

Biomedical Engineers and BMET’s will be interested to know that although manufacturing jobs are predicted to decrease 10.8% overall the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry jobs are expected to increase by 23.8 %.    Job seekers should keep in mind that although some job categories are not growing quickly or even declining 34 million of the 50 million job openings between 2006 and 2016 will be become available as a result of replacement needs.  Its probably fair to say that a significant percentage of those replacements are  a result of the baby boom generation retiring.  Due in good part to the aging population healthcare and social assistance which includes public and private hospitals, nursing and residential care facilities, and individual and family services will add 4,000,000 jobs in the ten year period.  BME’s and BMET’s should note that  corporations that are creating product for healthcare have been and will be trying to create new products to help these professions and facilities manage their growing patient populations.  Home healthcare has been an area of considerable interest given the reduced costs and lower probability of hospital acquired diseases or in medical terms lower morbidity.   BME and BMET students may want to keep the manufacturing and home healthcare trends  in mind as they choose their senior projects and look for internship opportunities.

In addition;

“Employment in professional, scientific, and technical services will grow by 28.8 percent and add 2.1 million new jobs by 2016. Employment in computer systems design and related services will grow by 38.3 percent and add nearly one-fourth ( ~500,000 ) of all new jobs in professional, scientific, and technical services. Employment growth will be driven by the increasing reliance of businesses on information technology and the continuing importance of maintaining system and network security. Management, scientific, and technical consulting services also will grow at a staggering 78 % and account for another third of growth ( ~700,000)  in this supersector. Demand for these services will be spurred by the increased use of new technology and computer software and the growing complexity of business.”

See Tomorrow’s Jobs from the OOH 2008-09