Lars Moss - IB2

Fact of the matter is, being an engineer, and being a medical professional are not all that much different until you boil down to the ethics of decision-making. While doctors and the like go through lawmakers, insurance policies, other specialists and their higher ups, usually an engineer's decisions are based entirely on his or her project constraints or the patent office. While I believe finding these two paths of  belief and decision to be consolidated and made more streamlined for the betterment of healthcare, a stasis to my argument would be that the way medical professionals and engineers work should remain fundamentally separated , or should rarely, if ever coincide and keep their beliefs and practices as strictly their own.

Conjecture:
So, the topic begins where belief systems affect healthcare decisions for each party - but how do they? Machines, principals and procedures may be concocted by an engineer but all the same by a doctor, so the conjecture should be made at the point where the logistics of these two ends of the spectrum diverge. One - presumably engineers - must rely on ingenuity and diving around fixed constraints and design standpoints, the other deals more with risk management and keeping said risk as low as possible for the safety of the patient. Belief systems keep these things in check and are the very principle both parties work by.

Definition:
Belief system - a set of values, principles, and postulates that aids decision making in a hopefully non-linear matter and/or solving issues by use of more or less systematic viewpoints. The definition holds true closer to engineers, as systems of belief is more or less a term native to engineering. Those in medicine do follow something similar, but it's far more systematic and carefully done.

Value:
As in the definition, the value of bringing these things together, as is desired in one viewpoint, is that the consolidation - either one to the other, or something completely new - less complicates medical innovation. Losing the methodic barrier between two vital parties means a greater influx of not only valuable items, but valuable ideas that arrive at the blueprint and go even further than the operating table.

Policy:
One loses policy and one gains - it happens when you swap the way each party works on their own. In the case of the sort of nondisjunction that goes on between the two comes the issue in which both parties can't do much but question the methods of the other whenever something that requires both their efforts comes to the table. It's either, "It's in our policy" or, "There is no policy for that." where the two endlessly hit the wall.

Of course, I personally am all for buddy-buddy to the two parties - even if it's more of a transparent issue, and even a monetary one - it's still something that's asked everytime some new medical device comes to the table - to prescribe it, diagnose it, suggest it, etc - but there are of course ways to go against it. Money is, of course one way to do so, but interfering with one pattern of thought could actually demolish productivity and innovation - it's to say that entrepreneurship, a thing that could possibly be lost in transition, is still pretty important. Though, through some if any means, I do think more cooperation is necessary.