Few economic sectors are more regulated than healthcare. While healthcare regulation is often seen as a bad thing - since it may create market access barriers, increase time-to-market and compliance may be costly - compliance brings with it the benefits of public welfare and corporate advantage - such as the assurance of product quality, market entry and product availability, as well as access to tax rebates and credit benefits. In this talk, we investigate some connections between regulation compliance and normative technical requirements. We present a multi-company exploratory case study on mean times-to-benefit after compliance. In this study, we focus on the diagnostic imaging equipment segment and the normative context of this industry in Brazil. We adopt many different data sources to support the investigation of mean time-to-benefit variability. We first show that the respective measures are organized as a lattice of temporally ordered events. Then, using statistical inference, we show that, in particular circumstances, time-to-benefit clearly depends on the normative technical requirements that different categories of diagnostic imaging equipment comply with. Consequently, we argue that concerns with such normative technical requirements contribute to improving the requirements engineering of public policies and healthcare products.
