This week I learned about medical technology and devices in the healthcare settings of high-resourced nations and low-resourced nations. I was surprised by how much costs are involved with an operation room in the US and how even disposable surgical gowns can cost thousands of dollars. I was also surprised by how primitive the operation rooms for low-resourced nations looked in comparison to high-resourced nations. From the picture alone in the lecture I would have assumed that the outcomes from the operations in low-resourced nations are not that great, but it turns out that most patients do recover to full function. This brings up an interesting question to if the massively more spending on more advanced medical technology and devices in countries such as the US is really justified. Obviously the healthcare situation in the US is much better than places such as West Africa, but there are probably areas where we could cut costs to lower the prices that have to be paid by patients without insurance. I was also relieved to learn that safety and clinical effectiveness are the most important factors in deciding to implement new medical devices, procedures, and vaccines.

I thought our discussion assignment was really interesting this week because we watched a video containing a variety of medical devices and then wrote about a specific device that stood out to us. I decided to write about the blood glucose meter because it reminded me of my grandfather and his struggles with diabetes. Overall this week was really informative.