Last week we discussed how surgical communities draw in innovators, an insight gleaned from our discussions with Dr Paul Slosar and his own involvements with innovation and mentoring within the Spine Connect community. The Syndicom team have just returned from the Emerging Technologies in Spine Summit where they hosted an afternoon session on Surgeonuity and discussed a new funding model for evidence based medicine research on spinal pathologies.

That’s right! This is one for all the surgeon-inventors! If you have an idea about research or potentially a new device you might want to know more about the Expert Surgeons Group just started by Syndicom in Spine Connect. The idea behind this initiative is to facilitate surgeon innovation as well as clinical trials, mentoring and research work. Surgeons attending the special session last week hosted by Syndicom explored a vast array of diseases on which to focus and are currently filling out a survey to see where their interests lie. The afternoon’s discussions revolved around what evidence research based projects should look like. Basically, projects should be disease centric with hypothesis based protocols, simply designed to collect consistent data, especially Level II evidence. Asking the right question is crucial here as are standards for diagnosis so that the research reveals different opportunities for innovation. Image collection should be standardized and in order to ensure high quality research, the group discussed potentially creating a webinar on just how to do create a research project with all these dimensions. There was also some talk of online training.

In engaging in such an initiative, Spine Connect hopes to draw on and highlight the considerable talent within its community and facilitate the creation of user designed tools based on evidence based research. As we have discussed in earlier blogs, this is one sure way to reduce the cost of health care for all, as specifically designed tools with evidence of clinical effectiveness and need are sure to be better utilized and also faster to market. Perhaps most importantly, devices and procedures invented by those who use them can demonstrate much higher patient value in terms of safety and care. So if you have an idea, if you would like to collaborate with others on evidence based research or if you just want to find out more about what happened at the summit, contact Syndicom at info at syndicom.com. We would love to hear from you!

Keep watching this space for new developments coming later this week and month!

With thanks to Vicki’s Pics and laughing squid for their images!

Good things happen when we connect!

Kirsten Broadfoot

Tags: clinical effectiveness, clinical research trial, clinical trial, clinical trials, collaboration, Dr Paul Slosar, emerging technologies in spine summit, evidence based practice, evidence based research, expert surgeons, in patient care, innovation, invention, mentoring, mentoring program, national patient safety, new technologies, new technology, patient care, patient safety, spineconnect, surgeons, surgical communities, syndicom, technology innovation, user designed tools

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 9:30 am and is filed under Blog.