Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
will open up the opportunity to devote attention to specific issues in the
following sections.
12.3.2.1 Medical Device Industry
The rapidly growing market of health-care and wellness products is an essential
opportunity for the industry to be exploited in the coming years. Health econ-
omy is globally recognized as one of the major sources of innovation (Amara et
al. 2003). The demand for health care is inevitably rising and the requirements
to enhance health-care products and services become more demanding in time.
Generally, one can say that such pressure has been the driving force behind
the enormous enhancements in medical technologies and great enhancement of
quality of interventions in health care in the past decades.
The vision of ambient intelligence in turn has created new opportunities
for the industry to exploit in the coming years. Namely, the challenge of
delivering personalized health-care products that are well tailored to indi-
vidual needs. Industrial strategies are mainly focused on the creation of a
new branch of consumer market where consumers can choose and buy their
own health-related equipment. However, it is still a question as to what extent
such activities can be profitable without cooperation of medical specialists and
health-care insurance companies, especially in the health-care setting of the
Netherlands. Cooperation with health insurance companies can have a large
impact on the scale of diffusion of products and services that the industry
is developing. Economies of scale can be the result of close cooperation with
health-care insurances in case they would be interested in purchasing prod-
ucts and services. Our interviews with major health-care insurance companies
in the Netherlands reveal that such cooperation is based on the incentive to
make insurance policies more attractive in terms of delivering better services
to enhance quality of care/life (as a competitive advantage to their clients).
Furthermore, health-care insurance companies have argued that collaboration
in pilot settings is a fruitful way to determine whether technologies can ful-
fill the promises about contribution to efficiency and quality of life. However,
such collaboration is also faced with question marks when it comes to the
information that is generated about a patient through possible applications
of BAN. The context in which medical information is used can raise privacy
issues and can carry potential risks of public controversy if abuse of informa-
tion becomes evident. Such an effect is difficult to foresee, particularly because
of the special character of the health-care industry, its services, and the added
value these bring to the patients. In situations where an individual's life is
in threat, adoption of technology and medical procedures and their further
direct and indirect consequences are easily accepted by patients (Parandian
2006). The context in which the BAN technologies are delivered are important
and patients can make trade-off decisions with regard to their privacy for the
sake of more comfort and certainty about their health state.
