The View from the Other Side [From the Editor]

Last summer, my wife and I found ourselves spending a lot of time in physicians´ offices and hospital outpatient facilities. These ranged from our local 36-bed rural community hospital to major internationally known medical centers. We were not there as clinical biomedical engineering researchers but as patients. In my case, much time was spent being connected to technology that we as biomedical engineers develop. Even more time was spent interacting with the bureaucracy of scheduling and paying for services, but that is another issue. Although I would not encourage anyone to become a patient if it isn´t necessary, there are advantages for those of us who design and evaluate medical devices to experience them from the patient´s rather than the developer´s and provider´s point of view.