Comparative effectiveness research, one of the key tenets of federal health reform, “seems good on first blush” but will have a chilling effect on medical innovation, Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove said.Comparative effectivess research (CER) refers to studying which types of treatment alternatives work best for a certain medical condition. Under health reform, Medicare [...]

Cleveland Clinic’s annual Medical Innovation Summit begins Monday, packed with its usual lineup of big-name medical device CEOs, healthcare heavyweights, media personalities and, this year, Dick Cheney.The summit annually tackles a major health issue (last year: obesity. This year: cardiology). And this is the largest summit ever: 1,000-plus attendees with most falling into one of [...]

Word has it that Cleveland Clinic is gathering nominees from its staff for the best healthcare innovations of 2012: the Top 10 list that’s the cornerstone of the health system’s annual innovations summit.This year’s summit, which starts Oct. 3, will focus on cardiovascular technologies. But the list never focuses on one single technology. And since [...]

Dr. Margaret Hamburg took over as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration four months ago. Already, she’s appointed a head for the new Center for Tobacco Products, begun to think about how to improve her agency’s drug approval process, and opened the door to regulatory science.

Could U.S. health care reform cancel out medical innovation, at least for a time? It could, but it doesn’t have to. Medical technology professionals should pull up a seat at the reform debate table.

Sometimes acquiring other drugmakers is the way to fill your company’s development pipeline with new drugs. On Tuesday, Schering-Plough Corp. CEO Fred Hassan, a speaker at the Cleveland Clinic’s ongoing Medical Innovation Summit, flew to Texas to launch Saphris, an anti-psychotic drug acquired in 2007.

A removable hearing and communication device that treats patients who have lost hearing in one ear is No. 1 on the Cleveland Clinic’s list of Top 10 Medical Innovations for 2010. Additional innovations honored by the Clinic this year include blood clotting technologies, sleep apnea devices and forced exercise for Parkinson’s patients.

At their annual innovations summit in 2008, Cleveland Clinic doctors, researchers and other professionals announced their third annual list of medical technologies they thought would be hot in the coming year. Some of the predictions were hits; others were ahead of their time.

New York Times columnist David Brooks was the featured dinner speaker Tuesday at the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit. Brooks prognosticated on the Obama administration and health care reform, and managed a handful of insightful one-liners and a commendable amount of physician-related mockery (all of which was well-received).

What better way to get doctors to use genetics with their patients than to show them their own genetic code? That’s something 23andMe has started to do with the Cleveland Clinic. The company, which offers a personal genome service to reveal trails from ethnic background to cancer probabilities, gave a handful of Clinic physicians the details of their genes.