The Power of Technology for Good: A Conversation with MDI's Mark Wehde
How do we know that new tech innovations will be used to help people, rather than harm them?
We don’t, of course. But TLI’s Medical Device Innovation program fellow Mark Wehde is an optimist on the subject. For him, it all comes down to human beings. Technology itself, he says, is neither good nor bad, but we get to decide how it’s used.
Mark’s interest in improving people’s lives led him to a career in Mayo as an innovator in the medical device industry.
He is the James J. Renier Chair in Medical Device Innovation at TLI’s MDI program.He is currently chair of Mayo Clinic Engineering, assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, and fellow in the Mayo Clinic Academy of Educational Excellence. Mark received a Master of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering from Iowa State University, a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from South Dakota State University, and a Master of Business Administration through the University of Wisconsin MBA Consortium.
Q: Mark, tell us a little about where you grew up, where you studied, and what drew you to the medical device industry.
A: I grew up in South Dakota, doing all the typical South Dakota things – hunting and fishing and track and cross country at school. But my real love was math and science and reading, that's what's started me down the the engineering path. I started at South Dakota State University and got my electrical engineering degree there. While I was doing that, I really fell in love with the esoteric side of electrical engineering – analog and sensors and physiological monitoring and that kind of stuff.
At that time we were just starting to get into the digital revolution; everybody wanted to do digital design or power-related stuff, and I wanted to go back and and do some of what I consider to be a little bit more interesting and biomedical engineering was a good place to be doing that. So this was in 1982 when I graduated, and there were only six biomedical engineering schools in the country; it was a relatively new degree program. And fortunately, Iowa State University had one.
I went to Iowa State University, had my masters in biomedical engineering, and it turned out that there were a couple paths for somebody with an interest in sensors, physiological monitoring, analog electronics, and that was the medical device industry, of course, which is what I had gone to school for. But the other path was the defense industry.
I had several job offers to go work on missile guidance systems, which is trying to be more efficient and effective at killing people, or go work in in health care where you’re trying to leverage the technologies to benefit people.
It happened that Mayo Clinic had an opening the year I graduated, so it was fortuitous that I had the opportunity to join Mayo and have been able to spend my career here.
When I started at Mayo, it wasn't the giant organization it is today. There were about 4500 people, and today, we've got 82,000, with close to 7,000 open positions, so if we were fully staffed we’d would be at almost 90,000 people. so the organization has changed dramatically over those years.
Q: What were the biggest technological changes you’ve seen during that time?
A: It’s been one change after another, starting in the 1980s with the computer revolution. Desktop PCs were coming out, computers and microcontrollers were being used in more and more products. So we started to see a lot more capabilities based on our ability to incorporate software into these devices and the sophistication went up dramatically because of that.
In my career I've seen a number of waves of technological change and we're going through another one with with AI, but there have been plenty of others: additive manufacturing, 3D printing, the ability to print prototype devices on demand.
On the healthcare side, of course, we've seen increased use of technology, where more and more health care is becoming a technology business as well, things like the electronic medical record. Mayo was doing work in the electronic medical record space starting around 1960. We had our first electronic medical records in-house in 1990, and much of the rest of the country didn't get electronic medical records until the 2010s – a lot of that funding was provided through the ACA.
Q: How did you first get involved with TLI?
I'd been a fan of the TLI program literally for decades at this point, because it was founded in 1987 as a leadership program that was aimed at folks that were working with technology and that had a lot of appeal to me.
The University of Minnesota used to partner with folks in the Rochester community to bring in an abbreviated program called the MOT Signature series, and that would come to Rochester each year. This was in the early early 2000s, I took advantage of several of those when they came down to Rochester.
Later when I had the opportunity to step in and help teach a foresight class a few years ago, I jumped at it because I was such a big fan, and had followed the TLI for 25 plus years. I came up for TLI events on a regular basis over the years, and I never really envisioned that I would become part of it.
I'd already been teaching within Mayo, and did some teaching with the University of Wisconsin, so the opportunity to start working with the medical device innovation program seemed a really good fit for my leadership development, and the med tech and healthcare industry in general. And my fundamental belief in the power of technology for good.
Q: What would you say to a young person considering the MDI program?
A: I tell them, “I’m not trying to sell you on the program. I'm trying to inform you about the program and potentially other options so you can make the best decision for yourself.”
In some cases TLI’s MOT [Management of Technology] program is a better fit, because they may already have a broad understanding of the medical device industry and really want to focus on improving their leadership skills. But more often, what I'm seeing is is students that they’re either coming from another industry with a solid technical background and wants to understand the medical device industry better, or people that are in the industry, but they're they're kind of pigeonholed in a small portion of it, and need to have a broader understanding of the whole landscape and and develop some leadership skills so they're able to to advance into more leadership positions within their organization.
So I try to have these conversations with them about what their objectives are and what they're trying to accomplish and, you know, share enough information so they can make that decision for themselves.
Q: You talked about waves of change. Everyone at the moment is talking about AI, what do you see that doing to the industry?
A: There are three major ways that I'm seeing AI impacting the industry.
First, it’s changing how we perform our day to day work, just in terms of cleaning up emails or doing some simple editing or helping us do a little bit of brainstorming. There’s a growing expectation that we're going to be using these tools on a regular basis. What I'm seeing and reading and actually experiencing myself is a significant increase in productivity; I think that's gonna translate into expectations around knowledge workers that we are expected to be 30 to 40% more productive.
For those of us using the tools, it’s just going to come naturally for us, but the folks that are resistant to using them are saying, well, maybe I'll learn it next year. Because of the exponential nature of this technology, the rapid pace of change with it, they’re going to find themselves really, really behind the curve.
In the engineering context, AI is now being integrated into our tool sets. It’s automating a lot of the design work that we previously did manually, and that's going to happen a lot more over the next few years.
Then the third piece, again across all industries but specifically within the medical device field, it's ending up in our products, our diagnostics, it's going to let the physicians focus more on the patients and less on the computer, and we're going to see improvements in products across the board.
Q: What would be an example of that?
It's already made huge inroads in radiology because it is so good at pattern recognition and image recognition. And the funny thing is, this isn't new.
AI has been moving into healthcare for ten or 15 years. The public awareness of generative AI is new, but I remember back in 2018, and we were seeing a lot of radiology systems, for example, that already had AI integrated into them.
Q: What about the cybersecurity of these products?
A: Cybersecurity concerns are not necessarily new either. We've been making network connected devices for a long, long time in health care. We didn’t initially realize how vulnerable they were to attack, but we know now that health care is one of the biggest targets.
At Mayo in 2015 or so of trying to identify all of our network connected medical devices, and you'd be amazed at how many there were. We identified well over 150,000 unique medical devices that were network connected, and we had to put a pretty robust system in place to go back to the vendors and make sure that they were addressing the security concerns.
Now we've got a system where any new device vendor needs to show that they are incorporating patches and performing the due diligence that’s needed.
Early on, we weren't terribly worried about security, but there were several conferences where folks demonstrated their ability to hack some of these devices and, you know, some high profile cases of devices that had been recalled – hundreds of thousands of devices in some cases – because of susceptibility. So medical device companies are now very aware of cybersecurity implications for connected devices.
Q: I know this is the time of year that students begin to choose their capstone projects. How is that going?
A: The students are both excited and feeling a little trepidation about it, because they're not quite sure what they're getting into. But I get excited about all of these capstones, One or two years ago we had this project on digital therapeutics as a complement to their organization’s device-based therapy device, so is there a digital therapeutic component to that? We had a student that looking at diabetes management from a user perspective because she herself was diabetic and there were a lot of things the manufacturers weren't addressing that were important to users.
This year a couple of students were talking about developing a framework around regulating AI. The FDA is figuring out how to manage this, the device manufacturers are figuring out how to make sure things are safe, so that's a kind of an exciting area to evaluate. The cool thing is that the students picked things that they're interested in, and that makes the whole experience really, really fun.
Q: Aside from AI, what do you see as the big trends in the industry going forward?
A: We've got several new technologies that are intersecting and overlapping at the same time, and they're enabling each other. One that we're really focusing on a lot is automation in the health care world; that's in the surgical robot space and doing certain procedures, but it's also for automation for more support related functions and health care.
Another thing we're seeing is a lot more home monitoring in health care. We're working to care for patients at home more, not requiring them to be in a hospital, and that means a lot more monitoring devices for people in a home environment.
It also means more thoughtfulness about the UX or user interface design, because you don't necessarily have a trained healthcare provider present. You have a patient or spouse or partner or child or parent. We have to be really thoughtful about the usability of these types of devices. We’ve seen a huge increase in virtual visits in particular, because the pandemic forced it to become the norm.
But I think this is something that is really going to serve our rural community as well, because we we are seeing – and this is a non-technology related trend – that in many rural communities, the physicians are aging out of their practices, and many of our young medical students are not interested in serving in those communities. Many of our rural communities are seeing a real lack of access. People end up having to drive for a couple of hours to access healthcare. So virtual visits can help address that to a large extent.
And then the other area is around augmented reality and virtual reality, which we're using more and more for training. There's a lot of training applications you can apply it to,, particularly when it intersects with surgical robotics, because you're able to create a pretty nice simulated environment to train people on some of these very complex procedures without having to do it on a a patient or an animal.
I think we'll see more and more surgeons with with some sort of VR goggles that they're that they're using to provide overlays and additional information when they're when they're doing surgery. So a lot of these different technologies are coming in and impacting the medical device industry, right now. So it's a cool time to be there and again, I mentioned earlier technology for good.
Tariq [Samad] and I are both part of the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers], the technology and engineering management society, and it’s an organization that promotes the use of technology for the good of humanity, and encourages us to find those beneficial uses. Technology in itself is agnostic, but it's how we use it that has the real impact on people in society.