I was listening to this old NPR interview of one of my business heroes Yvon Chouinard The focus of the interview is on how Patagonia wants you to buy less, so they create a high quality lifetime product with replaceable parts. You don’t need to continue to buy from them year after year. Because of the high quality and design to last a lifetime, the cost of the product is very high. It got me thinking about the price of software in medicine.

Compared to other software, the cost of software in medicine is very high.

Why doesn’t the quality reflect the high cost?

If it doesn’t go to quality, what does the cost go to?

If we agree on this, what can be done to eliminate costs that do not contribute to the value or incentivize higher quality or less expensive products?