With over a decade building products that are used in them, I'd agree but it's even worse than that. The sale is so abstracted it's nuts. Purchasing decisions are made by group-executives, for hospitals, for users (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, patients).

The distance between the users and the buyers is awful. I think it's easily the largest problem in getting quality innovative products into the hands of acute-care clinicians.

I think IT and devices are two different problems entirely. Most of the healthcare groups I've worked with have their IT purchasing decisions made by the IT department with minimal input from the senior staff or medical staff. The IT departments are making their decision based on begin largely underfunded and are trying to implement any solution that requires the least amount of effort on their part because of labor cost savings. Which is why you don't have too look very hard to find high cost solutions with terrible interfaces for physicians but decent interfaces for IT administrators.

Medical devices have mostly been vetted by physicians and provided to the IT department who tries to discern what works well in their current network. All the fat cat decides is a yes or no to the entire proposition. It's a people system, sales isn't about convincing one person its about convincing many.

The largest problem is always in getting innovative products into the hands users. With IT its no different than normal and with medical devices you have to make disclosures to the FDA because of patient safety considerations, but this paperwork isn't particularly difficult.

Healthcare products can generally fall into two categories (1) the game-changing technology and (2) everything else.

#1 above will sell itself (think implantable glucose monitor).

#2 will sell well if it solves one of the top three problems the organization is facing.