Our health system is undergoing radical change, which is accompanied by a significantly increasing imbalance among all concerned. Highly qualified medical specialists are seen alongside a lack of general practitioners and nursing staff and an increasing number of older and sicker patients. The result is that patients are increasingly having to carry out medical procedures themselves, including using feeding tubes and administering subcutaneous injections. There is also an increasing number of staff in medical facilities who are performing more complex tasks on medical devices under extreme time pressure and with very little advanced training. The lines between patients and specialised personnel are therefore becoming blurred.
Apart from costs, it is only the legal hurdles that are stopping us from using simple diagnostic tools ourselves and sharing and discussing the results with a doctor via Skype. And, today, it is precisely those people with chronic illnesses who often advocate a high degree of self-dependence in order to make treatment easier and less costly.
This is opening up a brand-new market. What if, in future, dialysis patients want to perform dialysis themselves so that they do not have to make the journey to the dialysis centre? Or, what if athletes wanted to be able to closely monitor and analyse their blood values at home?
In the fiercely competitive market of medical technology development, it is advisable that companies continue to accommodate and gear their development towards this the potential user group – because it is only a matter of time before user centricity becomes a standard requirement.