In the April issue of MD&DI, the winners of the 2008 Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) competition are revealed for the first time. One thing that stands out about many of this year’s winners is how well their designs contribute to improving the process of medical care.

What a subset of these winners did was eliminate steps in the caregiving process—which, among other things, reduces the chances for error. “The trend that stood out for me was the introduction of technologies that enable healthcare providers to do more with a patient in a single visit,” says MDEA juror Molly Story, president of Human Spectrum Design LLC (Santa Rosa, CA). “These advances improve care by increasing the quality of care and by reducing the number of patient visits needed—and in some cases, time under anesthesia—which saves time and money, as well as risk to the patient.”

For example, two winners enable healthcare providers to fabricate objects on the spot—in one case dental inlays and crowns, and in the other case, radioactive seeds. Two others enable caregivers to assess patients on-site in ways that weren’t possible before. All of them take two or more steps and condense them into one, saving the patient a return trip or other inconvenience.
    
Another commonality among winners was strict attention to the user interface.

“Paying appropriate attention to the user interface is valuable, especially when it addresses issues such as use error or efficiency, or does not add another burdensome device to the clinician’s already task-challenged life,” says juror William Hyman. He is a professor of biomedical engineering at Texas A&M University (College Station).

This is particularly important in the current day and age, says jury chair Herbert Voigt, PhD. “We are an aging society, so the human–machine interface must take that into account,” says Voigt, who is a professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University. “Displays must be easy to see, buttons must be easy to handle. One of the products this year had textured buttons so that it could be controlled in the dark.”

When designing an outstanding medical product, no detail is too small or insignificant, as you can see from the winners profiled in this issue.

Erik Swain
erik.swain@cancom.com