Medtronic makes cost savings a priority in 2012 and beyond (Weekend Rounds)

A review of life science current events reported by MedCity News this week:

Medtronic wants to trim a quarter of costs on top of $1B already cut. In an earnings call last week, Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) CEO Omar Ishrak announced he was challenging the medical device maker to cut 25 percent of its costs — up to $1.3 billion — from everything from logistics to sales over the next five years.

New report: The nation’s top 10 life science clusters. In what’s sure to spark debate and friendly competition among the nation’s life science hubs, real estate and financial services firm Jones Lang LaSalle (NYSE:JLL) unveiled a report ranking the top life sciences clusters. Following Boston were New York/New Jersey, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C./suburban Maryland.

5 companies using big data to solve healthcare problems. Thanks in part to billions in federal subsidies for electronic medical records (EMRs), it won’t be long before the U.S. is awash in vast, almost incomprehensible amounts of health data. It follows that developing the analytics to draw meaningful conclusions out of those mountains of data will become an increasingly important ’ and lucrative ’ area for companies in the health IT industry.

Hospital bad debt continues to climb. Cleveland Clinic reported that spending on bad debt rose a whopping 49 percent to $86 million, The Plain Dealer reported. The area’s second-largest health system, University Hospitals, said bad debt rose 13 percent to $17 million. Even smaller, suburban hospitals are feeling the pain. Parma General Community General Hospital said its spending on bad debt skyrocketed 77 percent to about $4 million.

Rivals threaten to take wind from Watson’s generic Lipitor sales. The launch of the generic Lipitor follows the end of Pfizer’s exclusive patent on the drug, but how much market share it will be able to secure for the drug, which had sales of more than $10 billion last year, remains to be seen, such is the level of potential competition.