Why am I in Healthcare Vertical Marketing? The “intersection” of Healthcare, Engineering, and Business October 8, 2007
Posted by reachkevinwang in Healthcare, Reflections.1 comment so far
Someone asked me why am I doing what I’m doing right now in Healthcare Vertical Marketing, and I responded with the following “essay”. 
A bit long but I think it helped me to organize my thoughts on this issue a little bit.
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I often question myself what do I really care about, and I’ve discovered that I really care about the general happiness of people. Healthcare has a tremendous amount of influence of people’s happiness on a very fundamental (physical and emotional) level. You can have all the money in the world, and have the coolest gadgets, but if you don’t have a good health then none of those would matter. This is the primary reason why I wanted to be in this field. But then I asked myself, as an engineer, how can I get myself involved and play a meaningful role?
In today’s age, healthcare is getting so much attention because the general population in North America is getting old and more people have started to rely more on healthcare, but it is suffering from far too many problems. Most hospitals still use paper patient records; the administration costs are rising sharply but the wait times at clinics are longer than most people could bear; and since the U.S. have a for-profit healthcare industry, there are always problems related to equality (so are all people getting the fair treatment that they deserve? What about the people who can’t afford health insurance?). A good movie to check out is “Sicko” by Michael Moore, which highlights some of those issues. These issues exist not because we don’t have good medicine and skilled doctors, but because the healthcare systems are generally inefficient. So, these fore mentioned issues are not really medical problems, but engineering and business problems.
Biomedical or bioinformatic engineering is a field where you are using engineering to solve healthcare related issues, and creating real business benefits in the process. Some example projects are designing better MRI machines that will reduce the scan time or designing electronic patient record systems that will help doctors manage patients with chronic diseases, so they can reduce their administration costs. These are examples of engineering projects that reduce inefficiencies in the healthcare field, thus generating real business value as in dollars saved and higher customer (patients) satisfaction. I like to call these examples the “intersection” of healthcare, engineering, and business.
I wanted to be in the “intersection” because I know that I’m not a lab scientist, who can perform life science experiments all day long trying to find a cure for a disease; nor do I feel I’m the type of engineer who build really cool gimmicks but has little practical value ( No offense to those who do that. I have great respect for them. It’s just not my cup of tea); and while I like people and business, I don’t want to completely abandon my technical skills.
Right now I’m in the Healthcare Vertical Marketing department at TELUS, so I’m more on the business side of the “intersection”. We have to research and understand various innovative engineering technologies that were created for the healthcare field, and think how will they generate real business value for the healthcare professionals, who are our customers. That’s why I say I’m working at this “intersection” with my job.
