By Chai Jing Xuan
Sitting at the intersection of medicine and engineering, lies healthcare innovation. With the development in recent years be it in wearable sensors, medical imaging systems to artificial intelligence driven diagnostics and implantable devices, advancing engineering expertise continuously drives new modern healthcare solutions. However, despite rapid technological progress, many healthcare innovations fail to translate effectively into real clinical impact.
I often refer biomedical engineering as the only engineering discipline that sits on the fine line between cold, heavy machinery and the soft, human flesh, which translates into the need for the communication gap to be closed between engineers and doctors. For healthcare innovation to truly succeed, engineers and doctors must learn to speak the same language, not only in terms of technical vocabulary, but also in understanding each other’s priorities, constraints, and ways of thinking.
When we speak about doctors, the image comes to mind that they are laser-focused on patient safety, clinical outcomes and evidence-based practices, their knowledge and skillsets often expanding with experience. Clinical decisions are guided by years of medical education, clinical guidelines, and real-world patient interactions. Engineers on the other hand, are trained from the education map to solve problems utilising mathematical models, systems-level of design thinking and various optimization techniques, where efficiency is often prioritised, alongside results, performance, scalability and innovation.
While both professions aim to improve human well-being, their different training backgrounds can lead to misunderstandings when they collaborate. Without a shared language, even the most advanced technology may fail to address real clinical needs. This makes the issue of speaking a common language more pressing and significant as technological advancements will not translate into real-time clinical impact without proper understanding and collaboration.
In healthcare innovation, or any innovation overall, the project and plan begins from problem definition. As engineers, it is common that solutions designed could be based on assumptions and calculations where not all of them fully reflect clinical realities. A highly accurate diagnostic algorithm could be developed, which needs to be trained using large amounts of high-quality data and long processing times, which might not be practical for healthcare practitioners such as doctors, despite being impressive from a technical standpoint.
With doctors accustomed to hospital workflows, they may have different needs for more rapid, interpretable results which can be immediately adopted, where the needs, wants and circumstances for each party may vary drastically. This makes it clearer than ever that if engineers and doctors do not communicate clearly at the early stages of development, the final product may be technically sound but clinically impractical. Healthcare innovation will be a standstill and technological advancements will not be fully utilised to revolutionise clinical outcomes and nation-wide developments.
Another challenge to bridge the gap between doctors and engineers lies in terminology and interpretation. Medical language is often known to be human-centric, where doctors focus on qualitative and patient-based conversations. On the flip side, engineering language is quantitative and systems-focused. A doctor may describe a problem using symptoms, risk factors, and clinical outcomes, whereas an engineer may think in terms of inputs, outputs, and performance metrics. For instance, when discussing “accuracy,” a doctor may be concerned about false negatives that could endanger patients, while an engineer may focus on overall model accuracy or error minimization.
Without aligning these definitions, both parties may believe they agree while actually prioritizing different outcomes. Many healthcare innovations demonstrate the value of this approach: the development of medical imaging technologies such as MRI and CT scanners required close cooperation between clinicians, who understood diagnostic needs, and engineers, who designed hardware and algorithms. Similarly, AI applications in healthcare benefit most when doctors define clinically meaningful targets, select relevant features, and interpret results, while engineers ensure robustness, scalability, and technical feasibility.
In these cases, a shared language enables mutual respect, productive teamwork, and innovations that are both technically sound and clinically relevant. Speaking the same language as doctors does not mean engineers must become clinicians, not that doctors have to become engineers. It is a set off and path to cultivate empathy, curiosity, adaptability, and the ability to understand that a perfectly optimized algorithm or device is meaningless if it cannot be integrated safely into patient care.
It is not a show or competition of who is more professional, neither a race of knowledge, but the recognition that both fields’ perspectives are just as essential, all to achieve the final outcome for the best in patient outcomes, ethics, workflow optimisation, realities and innovation scalability. I have witnessed first hand during internships that when perspectives as diverse as there are aligned, the results can be transformative, such as the development of infusion systems that prevent medication errors, cochlear implants that genuinely improve lives, and AI systems that augment rather than complicate diagnosis.
In conclusion, healthcare innovation is not just about engineering brilliance in silo, nor solely about strong medical expertise, but actually about connection, dialogue and empathy. It has been demonstrated time to time again that doctors and engineers speaking the same language is the key to unlock transformative healthcare innovations, to move from a collection of technologies into a system that truly serves humanity.
As a soon to be engineering graduate and an aspiring student, I hope to deepen my ability to bridge this divide, so that the next generation of healthcare solutions is not only cutting-edge, but meaningful, practical, and life-changing.
About The Author
