Author: barry.belmont
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A historical moment, soon to be footnote, to notice
As the aspirations of those politically inclined once again seek to ride emergent currents of popular thought to positions of power, let us for a moment take a look at a single parenthetical sentence in a single obscure document from a single side of a story from the several larger dramas of culture, climate, politics,…
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Rule 5, Section 4, Article 3, Item 7
As no doubt countless people who visit this website know, the last three sentences of the 2018 National Football League Rulebook Rule 5, Section 4, Article 3, Item 7 read as follows: Kicking shoes must not be modified (including using a shoelace wrapped around toe and/or bottom of the shoe), and any shoe that is worn…
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Poor quality of health care was a major driver of excess mortality across conditions
That headline may not be a surprise to many, but it is a central finding of a study entitled “Mortality due to low-quality health systems in the universal health coverage era: a systematic analysis of amenable deaths in 137 countries” by Kruk et al. recently published in The Lancet. Other findings from said article include the…
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Dick Sarns, medical device legend, retires
Dick Sarns, founder of NuStep and designer of the heart-lung machine that revolutionized cardiac bypass surgery from the 1960s onward, has retired. Having celebrated his 91st birthday back in June and done more for medical device innovation in Ann Arbor than perhaps any other human being, Sarns has more than earned such a respite. I hope you…
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Medical device reprocessing
A bullet point summary of a burgeoning biomedical market. In about the 1980s/1990s, America’s healthcare system transited to a single-use interface between patient and medical system. (You don’t want to use the same needles as the last guy.) The technology/innovation lifecycle seems to just get faster and faster and faster. However, a manufacturer certified refurbished…
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A BrightInsight: getting medical data in the cloud
Flex, a company which tries to solve a little bit of everything, has recently developed a set of secure and managed solutions, called BrightInsight, that leverages Google’s Cloud Platform to aggregate medical data and deliver real-time insight into the efficacy of a drug, a device, a combination, etc. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that healthcare…
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A precedential case: hybrid medical devices
On March 1, 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a first-of-its-kind decision upholding that federal law can (and does) preempt state law claims in suits brought against medical device manufacturers over medical devices containing components of differing regulatory classifications. The case, Shuker v. Smith & Nephew, arose when a Mr.…