Or maybe Dr. Roderic Pettigrew (awesome name by the way) was referring to his employer, the National Institutes of Health. More on that later.
I’m not sure if organizers of the Design of Medical Devices conference at the University of Minnesota deliberately did this but I thought Dr. Pettigrew, the director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, was a perfect bookend to the previous day’s luncheon keynote speaker, former U.S. Senator Dave Durenberger. While Pettigrew argued that new technology was essential to cost control, Durenberger decried “the medical arms race” and declared that the country should instead “encourage lifestyle changes.”
I’m not suggesting something as simplistic that Dr. Pettigrew is “pro” technology while Durenberger is “anti” technology. Indeed, the key to creating low cost, quality health care probably is a combination of technology and behavior. But the entire health care debate is full of these apparent contradictions.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
To ultimately lower costs, we must spend a lot of money adding 30 million new people to health care rolls, Durenberger says. Medical device makers should focus on creating low cost, non-invasive, mobile technologies but still work on “medical moonshots” that change the world, Dr. Pettigrew said.
Devices should be inexpensive, Dr. Pettigrew said, even though technologies are always cost a lot in the beginning before prices drop over time.
Uh…so how do we do that? one audience member asked.
“That’s a good question,” Pettigrew replied. “I would be interested in hearing what you (the audience) thinks about that.”
Translation: I haven’t the faintest clue. (No one else had any ideas by the way.)
Contradictions abound at the NIH. The stimulus package passed by Congress last year pumped $10.4 billion into the NIH. The extra money resulted in 20,000 new requests for NIH funds yet the agency could only fund four percent of the pool because it did not have enough money. In other words, the NIH stimulus funds created new projects that the agency was ultimately unable to support.
Though President Obama’s FY2011 budget proposes a 3.2 increase in NIH funding to an inflation adjusted $32.1 billion, that’s considerably less than the $35.4 billion the agency received in 2004.
“The proposed budget will not be sufficient to sustain progress toward all of the emerging opportunities currently supported by the FY2010 budget,” according to a recent report by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. “Funding at the proposed level will ultimately result in a reduction of research capacity and the interruption or possible termination of promising new research directions.”
Perhaps NIH is lucky to get any increase, especially in the face of skeptical lawmakers demanding to see more immediate, practical results.
Congress would say “‘I know you’re a great rat doctor but what difference have you made for my constituents?'” Pettigrew said. “Over the past several years, there has been a growing appreciation for emerging health care technology” that can solve real problems and offer real benefits.
In other words, get your head out of the lab and actually help people!
This new shift toward real world problem solving from pie-in-the-sky concepts seems like a no-brainer but for researchers used to conducting experiments and writing papers, it can be a difficult transition.
Which is why the NIH and Food and Drug Administration recently joined forces to speed technology to market by “helping researchers understand regulatory parameters for drugs and devices,” Pettigrew said.
The initiative creates a “Joint Leadership Council” led by NIH Director Francis Collins and FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and provides $6.8 million to help people gain expertise in regulatory science.
“Technological innovation is required [for a health care system to] do more for less,” Pettigrew said. “This simply cannot be done without being innovative.”
