Why are clinical trials so expensive? Tales from the beast’s belly
This is a very naive. As a techie that became a physician and I'm now back in the tech world, it took me a long time to understand a fundamental difference in approach. The medical world moves very very slowly and it seems very very inefficent to a tech person. It is a necessary evil. In medical world, lives are at stake. The ethos is first, do no harm. It is inherently and  arguably necessarily slow to change.<p>The ethos in tech is just fundamentally different. Move quickly, break things. Its an Agile mindset of quick changes, pivots, rapid advances. Inefficiencies get identified and are tackled.<p>Medical world is different. The inefficiences are a feature not a bug. They are there to exactly do what they are doing, slow the rate of change. Clinical trials is one place where both worlds collide, the fast pace technical innovation world  is about to interface to the slowly changing medical world. All of these guys frustrations is exactly about that.<p>He might think the solutiom is to speed up clinical trials phases. It isn't. Even if you did, sooner or later you will still come to another traffic stop of slow changes and inefficiencies because the medical world moves at a different  pace, and necessarily so. When lives are directly involved the burden of proof to enact changes have to necessarily be very very high.<p>And what techies do not understand and probably keep asking is "doee it have to be so?". Yes it does. We didnt arrive here by accident. Even if we started healthcsre industry anew, it will inevitably end up in this slow-changing equilibrium. When lives are directly involved, better to leave things as is, than change and make worse. The burden of proof for even the slightest of changes is extremely high. what's optimal for health is indeed a slowly changing world. It is not for lack of talent or intelligence, as this author naively suggests. If you want to solve problems with quickly, don't go near that world. Stick to the world of optimizing ads