Design verification is an essential step in the medical device development process. It gives quantitative data on whether or not the prototype of the device is working to specification. This allows for the understanding of problems that do not arise until the device is actually built. As you said, merzkrashed, doing it early allows for these problems to be identified and resolved early, thus reducing overall design time. If a company does not carry out proper design verification then it can lead to problems occurring whilst the product is on the market which will be highly damaging to the company and those affected by it.

I have some experience with this in my capstone class. We are using IR LEDs to illuminate the eye as a part of our project. We need proper design verification to make sure that these LEDs will not hurt the users of our products.