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.
As technology advances, AI-powered tools will increasingly reduce the administrative burdens on healthcare providers.
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.
Closing cancer health equity gaps require medical breakthroughs made possible by new funding approaches.
Sam Palmisano told the attendees of the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit that health care can barely be called a "system." To become one, he said the medical industry must agree to universal, open and non-proprietary standards for health care records. In essence, he said, electronic medical records have to be like generic drugs and the data must flow throughout the system in which no provider owns the process.
Cancer. It's still a devastating diagnosis, though doctors are getting better at treating it, and researchers and companies are getting better at developing and marketing therapies. Developing cancer treatments is time-consuming and costly. Personalized medicine may be best way to treat cancer; partnering, best way to spread risk and cost of development.
The reform-minded tenor of the times also will shape the 2009 Medical Innovation Summit. Along with offering insight into cutting-edge cancer treatments and predicting the greatest medical innovations of 2010, the conference will host U.S. Food and Drug Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg and hear from 14 CEOs from companies including AstraZeneca, IBM, Merck, Novartis and Schering-Plough. "You'll be hearing from folks right in the crucible," said Chris Coburn, executive director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations.
Join the CEOs of IBM, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Schering-Plough and Merck for an unrivaled perspective on the newest medical cancer technologies and the financial drivers behind those innovations at Cleveland Clinic's 2009 Medical Innovation Summit from Oct. 5 to 7 at Cleveland's InterContinental Hotel & Bank of America Conference Center.
The future looks bright for the integrated specialty pharmacy model – for health systems, providers, and most importantly, for patients.