Comment by squigz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by squigz | Hacker News Reader

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"Some aspects of the Formula One handover were not transfer- able to the medical handover process. When the consultant from Formula One went to GOSH and looked at the whole handover process, he said it would be best to engineer out parts and get new equipment. He noted the complex technical problems with the handover ... The Formula One consultant asked, “Why don’t you just have one thing that does both and has its own power supply and its own ventilator?” This was obviously what needed to be done, but it turned out not to be feasible since manufacturers were not interested in producing the needed equipment. They were not interested because the market is very small (only children) and hospitals would never be able to replace all its beds at the same time due to the exorbitant cost of the proposed new equipment. While the Formula One crew can count on using technology to improve their handover process, the hospital team could not; they had to rely more on human beings and less on state-of-the-art technology."

Formula One teams are known to throw money (and lots of it) at problems. It works for them because:

  - 2 drivers/cars per team.
  - ~2 hour race on a weekend every ~2 weeks per season.

They don’t need to solve every problem and the solutions just need to work well during the race (at least for the pit crew).

The hospital needs to do this for hundreds of patients every day. They need solutions that can scale (cost less per person). This was about one specific problem (handover) but different patients could bring with them different complications and add new constraints.

Still very cool though. Glad they got some actionable insights.

It's more to do with the bureaucratic costs of getting a product licensed as a medical device. By the standards of the medical industry, an F1 wheel nut gun or a WEC refuelling rig isn't particularly expensive; the prohibitive part is getting a specialist item approved for medical use. Motorsport can do things that don't scale, because no-one is stopping them from using a one-off prototype made to precisely fit their needs. They (and their suppliers) iterate incredibly rapidly Bringing a new medical device to the market is an immensely expensive multi-year project. Obviously there are benefits to the precautionary principle, but I'm not sure that anyone has quantified the costs.

> It works for them because:

You missed item number 3 from your list ....

Because F1 has a shit load of sponsors willing to throw a shit load of money at the team as long as they get their logo on the side of the car.

Hospitals don't have that. Even the US has not (yet ?) stooped so low as to have corporate sponsorship for hospitals !

"Mr Patient, your heart operation is being sponsored by $megaCorp ... pay extra to remove the ads from your implanted pacemaker".

> they had to rely more on human beings and less on state-of-the-art technology.

They would do better to look at the Michelin starred kitchens starting with leaning to keep their work spaces organized and clean no matter how fast they are moving. Here is a good example of an engineered kitchen. "Oui" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfxQuXT66s

Where I live, ambulances use pulse oximeter probes incompatible with those used by in hospital and issued to home (my daughter was ventilated at night and this was a real issue). That one at least would be solved (and not expensively if only people talked to each other. It didn’t need Ferrari to surface that one!

It's not just oximeters.

I once worked as a paramedic at the German-French border in the 1990s. Cross-border collaboration between us ("DRK RPF 2/83/1") and the French firefighters ("Samu-67") was cordial but the radio frequencies were not just different but such that the German radios could not even be set to the French frequency (this was before mobile phones were spread beyond C-net phones for business people that looked like suitcases), and syringe tips and infusion needle tips had incompatible endings.

So on one occasion, after running out of medicine and lacking a medic, we called the French colleagues for assistance, and we'd improvise and put a needle on a syringe and injected atropin, adrenaline etc. as needed into the plastic infusion bottle instead of connecting the syringe's ending right to the incompatible butterfly (nick name for the intravenal needle). That episode (Saturday, August 1, 1992) remains particularly memorable since this was my first day on the job, and job #4 on that 24-hour-shift (now they are banned to work that long) would become my first primarily successful resucitation after 45 min of CPR.

Standards (and open borders) can save lives.

45 minutes of CPR sounds like it would be really rough on both you and the patient. Better than dying though :)

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