More than five months into a successful recovery from surgery to remove a golfball-sized meningioma, medtech industry veteran Bill Betten reflects on lessons learned.
Bill Betten, Betten Systems Solutions
A neurosurgeon walks into the room and says, “So you’re the interesting case.” Not exactly words one wants to hear, but the scientist and engineer inside me waited to hear the punch line. I had recently been informed that I had a brain tumor a bit larger than a golf ball in my head, and I was here to discuss options.Fast forward to today, and I’m months into a mostly successful recovery from surgery that removed what turned out to be a benign tumor. I have a very interesting scar slowly healing on my head. I’m still waiting for my new superpower to show up now that I’ve got the extra room in my brain, but perhaps my personal journey will be the reward in itself.
While my observations certainly aren’t going to reform health care, the process certainly gave me a different view than my usual product development or technology role, and I hope you gain a new perspective as well.
Just to tell you more about myself, I’m a physicist and an electrical engineer who’s had the great pleasure of working for decades on product development for some of the world’s largest companies as well as startups. While much of my career was spent in and out of hospitals working for medical device development companies, that experience did little to prepare me to be a patient or user of many of the products and services on which I’d worked over the years.
Get the full story on our sister site Medical Design & Outsourcing.
[Bill Betten discussed his story at DeviceTalks Minnesota in September, as well as in a recent podcast with MDO editor Chris Newmarker. Discover more great medical device stories at DeviceTalks West, Dec. 9–10 in Santa Clara, Calif.]