Innovation, Evidence and Governance of Medical Technology

Abstract

Contemporary healthcare is characterised by what the UK government in the 1990s saw as a ‘tidal wave’ of innovation in health technology. Healthcare sciences and regulatory institutions for steering innovation have, over the last 20 years, been a notable social and political accompaniment to this tidal wave. Medical technologies are the product of global industries and the object of multidimensional promotion and regulation. Contemporary technological healthcare is characterised by a multitude of medical devices, ranging from the bandage to the bioreactor, the thermometer to magnetic resonance imaging, from the cancer-screening test to the heart pacemaker and to human cell and tissue therapies. These technologies are hugely different from each other as artefacts, but the ways in which they are promoted and controlled in societies and economies have notable consistencies.