Reinventing the Wheel in Medical Device Development

Medical Device Technologies

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Reinventing the Wheel in Medical Device Development

Invariably when developing a medical device, there will be medical device technologies which are required and which have already successfully been implemented by others. Maybe it’s a circuit, like a DC/DC converter or even a single-board-computer; maybe it’s a software library or a particular logic implementation. It could be the choice of an existing communication protocol versus a custom-designed one. 

As these medical device technologies are identified, the question comes up whether to buy it or reinvent it. Depending on the circumstances either choice may be appropriate.

Reinventing the wheel often has negative connotations. Mostly this is because the effort is considered wasted: someone already did it. The effort may be more appropriately put to developing the key technologies that don’t already exist. Also, just because someone else has done it doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy! Many times all you have to start with when redeveloping technology is the knowledge that it’s possible. Remember, they might be much smarter than you, too! It may seem at first that buying the technology is expensive, but that’s before you over-ran your budget and timeline trying to get it to work.

So why would you do this? To shamelessly overlap another metaphor, there’s freedom in owning your own wheels. Licensing or buying existing technology can be expensive; it can also be limiting. Maybe a software library will only run on a particular OS. Maybe a license is restricted to certain applications; it may not be for sale, or perhaps your competition owns it. Designing your own circuit might make it smaller or cheaper. Another benefit – especially if the technology is critical to your application  and non-trivial – is that you will often gain a deeper understanding and have more control over the exact feature-set and specification if you develop it for yourself.

Even if you’ve decided to re-implement a technology there’s still an important question to answer: when. It’s often not a good idea – though it may be fun – to spend a ton of effort designing things which can be readily bought, even if it makes sense in the long run.

At StarFish we recommend prioritizing effort developing those technologies which are crucial to the success of the project, have a large uncertainty in their development effort or have many other technologies depending on them. If you’re pretty sure the effort will be small, or predictable then why not put it off? This is especially true if you can buy-in the outside implementation in the interim and switch over later. It’s all about reducing risk in the overall development program.

Having said that, there are times when you should reinvent the wheel and do it NOW. Often the task is huge and therefore on the critical path. Sometimes the decision to buy-in or reinvent is put off until the viability of reinventing has been evaluated. If that decision has significant, knock-on effects on the device configuration or specification then you’d better get started pronto.
I guess the take-home message is to consciously recognize when you’re about to reinvent the wheel and weigh the reasons for doing so. If you’ve chosen to do it, then think carefully about when to schedule the effort.

Kenneth MacCallum, PEng, is a former Principal Engineering Physicist at StarFish Medical. He works on Medical Device Innovation for a variety of areas including microfluidic cartridge systems and ultrasound applications.