Bridge over troubled waters: Connecting doctors and engineers

Abstract

While doctor–engineer collaborations are imperative for the advancement of medical technology to improve patient care, these partnerships are often fraught with poorly understood barriers, including differences in knowledge base, conflicts over authorship and difficulty in applying deterministic solutions to biological data. As there is scarce literature on the dynamics of doctor–engineer collaborations, this essay discusses these hurdles and proposes practical ways to overcome, or at least attenuate them.

Keywords::

• Facilitation
• research
• transdisciplinary

Acknowledgments

I would like to express greatest thanks to my lecturers and classmates in University College London for teaching me Mathematics and Physics. Similarly, I am very grateful to my colleagues and patients in National University Hospital, Singapore, for teaching me care and compassion.

Declaration of interest

The author reports no conflict of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.