Diagnostics & Imaging Week Associate

CLEVELAND – “Innovation is a societal and economic manifestation of hope,” said Delos (Toby) Cosgrove, president and CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, in welcoming attendees to the third edition of the Medical Innovation Summit at the InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center earlier this week.

He said that the U.S. is the embodiment of that hope, but cautioned that “if America stops innovating, we stop being Americans.” He added that innovation is also vital to the future of healthcare “both in terms of quality and affordability.”

Bolstering Cosgrove’s assertions was keynote speaker Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives who currently heads the Center for Health Transformation (Washington), an organization that focuses on technological development for better healthcare and lower costs.

In his opening remarks, Gingrich challenged the audience to take its collective experiences from the three-day event and really try to “test the system.”

Gingrich, himself a professor who taught history at the college level, used lessons of the past to illustrate both the promise and peril that the future can hold for the healthcare system in this country.

He said that much of the healthcare system as it is today has been complicated by its past and current interaction with the government.

Comparing his experiences in dealing with national security and healthcare, Gingrich said that healthcare was “30 times more complicated than national security,” largely because of the huge impact that a major healthcare crisis like a potential pandemic caused by the much-discussed avian flu could have on society.

“We are right at the edge of the future,” he said, noting that for planning purposes his audience should expect “at least four times as much scientific change in the next quarter-century as we had in the last century.”

To put that in perspective, Gingrich said that the period from 2005 to 2035 “at a minimum will resemble 1905 to 2005.”

If this surge in knowledge holds true to form, he envisions a world-class healthcare system that shockingly could be quite inexpensive. “In a science- and technology-based free-market system with entrepreneurship, customers should have more choices of higher quality at lower cost,” he asserted.

As a simple example of how technology has come down in price, Gingrich cited the now-ubiquitous cell phone. When cell phones first came out in 1978, he said that they were expensive, bulky and had a poor short-lived battery. But now, he said, “we basically give them away.”

To add a medical twist to that invention, he noted that there now is a cell phone that can measure blood sugar levels for diabetics and send that information on to a healthcare provider.

Gingrich rhetorically asked why we as a society are not getting the benefits of the current technology boom in the form of lower prices and more choices. The answer, he said, is the overabundance of government interference. “The government is a marvelous inhibitor of competition,” he said, adding the caveat, “you show me an area that’s not working well and I’ll show you an area in which the government has intervened.”

Part of this new consumer revolution in healthcare will come, he said, when the government passes legislation to allow consumers to find published information on the prices and quality of healthcare at institutions throughout the country.

One catalyst that could spur radical change in how the government currently operates the healthcare system, said Gingrich, is the threat of avian flu. He said that the threat of avian flu will spur society to demand “that government become radically more competent than it was before, and that will lead I think, to moving toward electronic health records.”

The notion that healthcare, like education, is a public good and therefore inappropriate for choice and competition, is breaking down, he said.

Gingrich said he sees this country on the cusp of one of the greatest changing points in its history due to the intersection of several totally different realities.

The first is the aforementioned rapid evolution of technology. “In the end, the American people migrate to better solutions with surprising speed over time,” although he characterized this transition as “not brilliantly in one day but brilliantly over 10 to 15 years.”

Another significant driver is the rapid evolution of two sleeping giants, China and India. “We are now faced for the first time since 1840 with competitors who are as big as we are or will be as big as we are within a generation.”

To withstand the competition that these large countries will generate, Gingrich said that the U.S. would have to think very seriously about “profound reforms in our system.”

He said we can’t “hide behind” a socialized system like those followed by many countries in Europe, particularly France, Germany and Italy.

“What you see in the western Europeans is an inability to come to grips with the future,” Gingrich said. “If we are in fact going to have a different response than Western Europe to the challenge of China and India, we will accelerate the rate of innovation.”

This can be achieved, he said, by passing tax laws that maximize the rate of innovation and adopt sweeping litigation reform.

Essentially, he said the current healthcare system must be transformed into a “21st century, intelligent health system.” To achieve this, he said, requires three parallel layers of change: individual change; institutional/provider change and scientific change.

“This is a big country and we have big challenges,” Gingrich said, but “we have every reason to think we can meet them.”