Medical Undertakings Should Be Quantified to Have A Potential to Be Improved

Abstract

The today’s efforts of system engineers to assure adequate and reliable performance of electronic devices, including medical devices, use, as a rule, qualitative, rather than quantitative, considerations. This is even truer about the performance of the healthcare and medical personnel. In the best case, the available pertinent aposteriori statistics is accumulated and taken into account. The author of this brief review developed, during his long professional lifetime, numerous predictive reliability models and accelerated test techniques in various areas of engineering and applied science and is convinced that the successful outcome of a medical mission or a more or less typical clinical situation cannot be expected, if it is not quantified. Every significant healthcare effort has to be quantified to be improved and because of the various inevitable intervening uncertainties, affecting its outcome, such a quantification should be done on the probabilistic basis.