Selection Process

Using state-of-the art technology and evaluating next-generation products has long characterized care provided at Cleveland Clinic. Which are the up-and-coming technologies and which will have the biggest impact on health care in 2010? This is a question that has been asked by Cleveland Clinic physicians and researchers ever since George Crile, one of Cleveland Clinic founders, wrote about the "invisible coin of infinite satisfaction" after he realized that one of his patients was restored to health through one of his inventions.

Cleveland Clinic's culture of innovation naturally fosters a good deal of discussion about "hot" new technologies and which ones will have the greatest impact each year. Their passion for getting the best care for patients drives a continuous dialogue on what technologies are just over the horizon.

This book was developed to share outside Cleveland Clinic what our clinical leaders were saying to each other and what innovations they felt would shape health care in the next year.

We used a rigorous process to gather the opinions of leading Cleveland Clinic physicians and researchers, create a field of nominated innovative technologies for consideration, and develop a consensus perspective of what will be the Top 10 Medical Innovations for 2010. Our team interviewed nearly 60 Cleveland Clinic experts to elicit their nominations.

Technologies that were nominated had to fit tight parameters:

• The innovations had to have significant clinical impact. It must offer significant patient benefit in comparison to current practices. The technology must also have high user-related functionality that improves health care delivery. (40%)
• Nominated innovations had to have a high probability of commercial
  success. (20%)
• The innovation must be in or exiting clinical trials and be available on the market sometime in 2010. (20%)
• The innovation must have significant human interest in its application or benefits, and must have the ability tovisualize human impact. (20%)

We probed the opinions of a broad cross-section of Cleveland Clinic staff from every major medical field. Our primary question was, "What innovations are changing the practice of medicine in your field?" In all, these interviews yielded nearly 100 nominations of emerging technologies.

The nominated innovations were screened to confirm threshold criteria and consolidate overlapping technologies. Our team prepared research on each remaining technology, and then presented a final list of more than 40 up-and-coming technologies and their data profiles to two separate panels of leading Cleveland Clinic physicians. In July, each panel met to debate and vote. The two panels then voted in the combined lists and established our final Top 10 Medical Innovations for 2010.

Through its rigorous selection process, the Top 10 represents important emerging technologies, based on the collective viewpoint of dozens of Cleveland Clinic leaders. For the first time ever, two of the technologies were developed by Cleveland Clinic Inventors. We hope you will find our selections interesting and will use them to stimulate your own thinking on future new trends and technologies and maybe even spur some innovation on your own.

For this fourth annual Top 10, Gerald Secor Couzens and AlixPartners, LLP assisted us in navigating the detailed selection process. AlixPartners, the international performance improvement, turnaround, and financial advisory firm, has a core of senior consultants who specialize in medical devices, retail and consumer goods, and the automotive industry.