‘An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.’ While the author of this quote is unknown, it is commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin. So in the spirit of old Ben, as people return from vacation and kids head back to school, we decided to compile an essential reading list for healthcare and medical electronics designers from our team of dedicated experts and bloggers.
As a general practice I follow the top LinkedIn groups and I set up Google alerts within my Google account using terms like medical, healthcare, health care, and either EETimes or MDT, or EDN. The trick is to set the search parameter ‘Volume’ to ‘All results’, and it hits one or two good articles per day. It’s not too much to take in. Some LinkedIn groups I follow are: Connected Health Community and Medical Device Forecast. There are also a few reports and bloggers I regularly look to for the latest industry news: Sean Fenske of Medical Design Technology (MDT), Bill Schweber of EETimes Medical Design and Sherrie Conroy of Medical Design. Also, I receive daily newsletters from Qmed, an online news source and directory for medical device suppliers.
Being informed medical news and design enthusiasts, we all have our favorites.
David Niewolny, our medical segment manager for Freescale finds LinkedIn groups enormously useful. “My favorite group is Wireless Health,” he says. He also follows Medical Devices Group, Medical Device Networkers, Medical Device Guru, Healthcare IT World, Medical Device Engineers Network and Med Device Engineer.
In Europe, Mickael Viot, head of business development for medical in EMEA, suggests that the European medical market is a bit different from the U.S. and the Asia PAC markets, as it is focused mainly on diagnostic and therapy devices, rather than consumer medical. To track the specificities of this market, he reads European Medical Device Technology (EMDT). It covers the main advances in research and technology, as well as the latest products arriving in the market and market information.
“Europe is also the home of six of the top ten pharmaceutical companies. Those companies are investing massively in R&D around drug delivery. Part of those investments go toward electronic devices like insulin pumps and inhalers. To follow all the latest advances in this fast moving field I read http://www.in-pharmatechnologist.com,” he says.
If you prefer your learning classroom style, DesignMED is coming up on September 27 and 28 in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center. Freescale’s Jon Adams and Mark Diperri will be teaching ZigBee
Health and Wellness: Wireless Monitoring and Sensing Solutions for Telehealth on Wednesday, September 28, at 3:30 p.m.