Hospitals

Ohio hospital execs: Pediatrics has an ‘unlimited supply’ of unsolved clinical problems

Commercializing new products in pediatrics comes with many challenges — among them that children make […]

Commercializing new products in pediatrics comes with many challenges — among them that children make up a small percentage of the population but have very specialized needs.

Hospitals, foundations and academic institutions in Ohio have really prioritized pediatric innovation over the past several years — but more on that in a separate post. Leaders at some of the state’s children’s hospitals shared the unmet needs most critical to them and their institutions on a panel at trade group BioOhio’s annual conference on Tuesday.

Niki Robinson, assistant vice president for the Center for Technology Commercialization at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, had a quick reaction to the question: pre-term birth. Earlier this year, three Ohio universities and four hospitals established a research collaborative aimed at finding unknown causes of premature birth, to which The March of Dimes said it would commit $10 million over five years.

“If you can fix that, you can fix a lot of downstream problems,” Robinson said.

Within a hospital, Matt McFarland, who heads up commercialization efforts at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said there’s a big need to address chronic infections. Although they don’t cause a high degree of mortality, chronic infections do carry burdens when it comes to morbidity.

University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital’s director of technology management, Stephen Behm, brought up more fundamental issues in pediatric care. “How do you get a 3-year-old to lie still when an MRI machine is making a sound like a freight train coming at you?” he said. “What about kids coming out of surgery where pain medication is required? Obviously there’s issues with narcotics and kids […] how do you help them manage those pain situations?”

There’s also potential for dramatic innovations outside of the hospital, said the director of nursing research at Akron Children’s Hospital, Aris Beoglos Eliades. “We have a large school nurse program, so we really work hard at moving care from inpatient to our ambulatory practice to the schools with asthma and diabetes action plans,” she said. “That’s where the kids are. They’re guests in our hospitals for a short time, but they’re living somewhere else.”

Other areas that were touched on briefly included oral health and mental health. “Really, we have an unlimited supply of areas of unmet need,” Robinson said.

[Photo credit: Betty G. Partin/Centers for Disease Control]

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