People who have chosen majors that coincide or overlap with healthcare are generally inclined towards knowing and understanding human body and its functions. Their mindset is geared towards working for solutions from a clinical perspective while engineers from other backgrounds tend to have mindsets that are focused on a direct problem-to-solution type of an outlook without the intricacies of problem solving from a clinical view point.

To give an example: while I was working in a CRO in India I knew a few co-workers from clinical data management (CDM) department whose role was to create CRFs, consent forms and other types of forms for clinical trials. The work done by them is usually following the instructions from their project leader word-to-word and getting the job done. As content from CRFs is usually reproduced and replicated from similar previous clinical trial studies, one would think not much thought is required in creating these forms. In one of the scenarios, a batch of CRFs had fields to be filled out in the symptoms section that is not even related to the present study but were included in the form because most of the content in the form was reproduced from another study. While these details can be missed out by a project leader, a clinical background person creating these forms can easily spot the unnecessary fields and bring it to the attention of the team or project leader regarding its relevancy and omit unnecessary information thereby boosting efficiency and quality. Therefore a person from a clinical background for the same job helps in efficient management of time, resources and money as compared to re-doing, recalling or re-printing all the forms from the work done by a non-clinical background employee because he/she does have clinical experience or inclination.