Weekend Rounds: Is personal responsibility the hottest issue in health-care reform?

Looking back at this week in MedCity, here are five things to consider over the weekend.

• Will personal responsibility be the most vexing issue in health-care reform? Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove got some blowback on his campaign that uses the problem of obesity to insert personal responsibility further into the health-care reform debate. At the same time, he’s become the poster boy for intolerance and the champion for physicians hoping for a better way.

• The continued emergence of proteomics and Case Western Reserve University researcher Mark Chance. The elite researcher gets a grant to move his proteomics research — which remains largely a research experiment — further toward a commercialized product. Learn more about his work, the man himself and how he’s positioned himself to both build companies and continue innovative research.

• Disillusion over health-care reform. “On a personal level, I am disappointed that the American public has an aversion for the complexity involved in this issue. If reform fails, it will be a failure in communication, not of ideas, as I believe the administration has most of that right.”

• Giving mobility to health care devices. Summit Data Communications makes the radio modules that enable wireless medical equipment to communicate with computers in hospitals and other treatment facilities so they can do their jobs while moving around.

• New brain power, new hope and new expansion plans from Ohio health-care. Cleveland’s Simbionix brings in new talent to expand the kind of products it offers; Columbus’ NeoProbe finds a development partner to take the next step to revive its colorectal cancer test; and word late that Cleveland Clinic is considering a bigger presence (again) in Las Vegas.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user tobyotter]