Morning Read: The best healthcare stock of the last 5 years

Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:

What’s the best-performing healthcare stock of the last 5 years? Bloomberg Businessweek has unveiled its annual ranking of the 50 top-performing stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the past five years. The healthcare industry leads the way, with 18 percent of the stocks on the list of 50. Tops among healthcare stocks and No. 2 overall is Intuitive Surgical, maker of the controversial da Vinci surgical system, which posted a Beelzebub-like 5-year return of 666 percent.

Healthcare embraces cloud computing: A new report shows that about 32 percent of healthcare organizations already use some form of cloud computing, and 73 percent report that they plan to move more applications to the cloud. Encouragingly, those numbers are in line with other industries, suggesting the health industry may not be the technology backwater that some assert.

Inside Medtronic: Medgadget’s editor took a trip to Medtronic’s Minneapolis headquarters to get an idea of what the future holds for the company, including an interview with Dr. Stephen Oesterle, a vice president of medicine and technology. “In interviewing Dr. Oesterle about the future of medical devices, two main themes emerged. He believes that minimally invasive is the future for most surgeries and that everything in the body is electrically active, and hence able to be modulated.”

NYU Ventures: New York University has established a $20 million venture fund with plans to invest in about six university-developed startups per year. “The goal of the fund is to accelerate entrepreneurship in an effort to stimulate the research that goes on here by attracting more students and faculty to the university,” the managing director said.

I believe the less-obese children are our future: Hailed as the first major study to report a declining rate of obesity in America’s children, a new report shows that rates declined 4 percent from 2006 to 2009. Encouraging results to be sure, but the study used what seems to be a small sample–4,603 students in 42 middle schools around the country.

The real problem with the nursing shortage: Some estimates hold that the nation will face a shortage of 260,000 nurses by 2025. But the problem isn’t that people don’t want to become nurses, it’s that there aren’t enough nursing instructors to teach those who do. Sixty-one percent of nursing schools cited lack of faculty as a barrier to producing more nurses.

Photo from flickr user Katrina.Tuliao