Even a small idea, given a small boost, can have a high impact. (Rick Kimpel/Flickr) When I tell people I work at the Technology and Innovation Development Office at Children’s (TIDO), they usually think I work to commercialize patented blockbuster drug candidates. But many of the most satisfying projects I help promote are innovations that [...]
Children's Hospital Boston's first Innovation Day Feb 14, 2012 On Tuesday, Children’s Hospital Boston featured its first Innovation Day. Organized by the Hospital’s Innovation Acceleration Program, which seeks to promote grass roots innovation within the hospital, the TEDMED style conference featured talks by 17 of the Hospital’s clinicians. Our Chief Innovation Officer Naomi Fried welcomed [...]
Anesthesiologists have to get by and around a lot of things in order to put a breathing tube into a surgery patient. Kai Matthes thinks that using a pair of endoscopes could make the job easier. (National Cancer Institute) Intubating the patient is a critical step in any surgery where general anesthesia is being used. [...]
Valentine's Day is Innovation Day (image: Richard Giles/Flickr) In a series of 17 short TED-style talks next Tuesday, February 14, clinicians and scientists from Children’s will present new products, processes and technologies to make health care safer, better and less expensive. The event, from 1-5 p.m. Eastern, is sponsored by the Innovation Acceleration Program. It’s [...]
Improving or maintaining access to clean drinking water is the best way to prevent a cholera epidemic. Twitter could prove an excellent way to help stop one. (Julien Harneis/Flickr) It was after the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake that mobile-friendly social media services like Twitter and Ushahidi came into their own as disaster management and relief [...]
Lorraine Sweeney in 1963, on the 25th anniversary of her historic heart operation. (Children's Hospital Boston Archives) When the first fetal cardiac surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital Boston in 2001 – entering Jack Miller’s heart through his mother’s abdomen and opening blood flow – the world was stunned. But more than 60 years earlier, [...]
While money is a concern in all cultures, recent economic crises have made money an especially hot topic in American discourse. The S-Collection has plenty of books about money: how people earn it, how people spend it, and how it affects people’s lives. This post includes a short list of nonfiction books about money and [...]
Brain tumors like the diffuse, light gray one in this MRI do a remarkably good job of hiding from the immune system. A new treatment based on gene therapy could strip their camouflage away. (Filip Em/Wikimedia Commons) If there’s anything that tumors are good at, it’s hiding themselves. Not from things like MRIs or CT [...]
[Ed. note: Tune in to the livestream Monday at 9:30 a.m. ET] Can the inventors of Watson help save sick children in the developing world? A “cloud-based” pediatric learning module, conceived by Children’s Hospital Boston and built by IBM Interactive, is being beta-tested this year in 20 countries. Provisionally called Pediatrics without Walls, it will [...]
There are no best practices for turning patient’s genome sequence into information that a doctor can easily understand…and act on. Children’s Hospital Boston’s CLARITY Challenge calls on the genomics community to come up with those practices, and possibly help three families in the process. (michab37/Flickr) Personalized medicine, harnessing genomics to improve patient care, is a [...]