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Hospital executives have never been frivolous when it comes to investing in technology, but as reimbursements shrink, the need to carefully analyze each purchasing decision has never been more urgent.

Given all the worthwhile – and not so worthwhile – options, what choices are hospital administrators currently making?

Since IT spending is largely taken up by meeting meaningful use and ICD-10 requirements, said Chantal Worzala, director of policy at the American Hospital Association, hospitals don’t have much left over for investments in other things.

Capital expenditure per bed for IT grew by 62 percent between 2010 and 2011, Worzala said, whereas total capital expenditure per bed grew by only 2.6 percent.

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This summer marked the inauguration of the DreamIt Health accelerator, a startup boot camp focused on healthcare IT run by DreamIt Ventures and powered by Penn Medicine and Independence Blue Cross.  In four short months, ten extraordinary teams of entrepreneurs, including four from Wharton, were brought together from around the country to achieve significant milestones going from concepts to prototypes, products, pilots and revenues.  As the program wound down, the investor, startup and healthcare community turned out in force for Demo Day to see a snapshot of each company’s progress and plans for the future.

Free Program Helps Researchers Explore the Commercial Potential of Technologies

The DC National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program is now accepting applications for its October cohort.

Open to research teams and technology entrepreneurs from universities, federal laboratories, agencies and the general community in the Mid-Atlantic Region, the free program guides researchers in exploring the commercial potential of their inventions.

“I-Corps provides real world, hands-on training on how to successfully incorporate innovations into successful products,” said DC I-Corps Director Edmund Pendleton. “The ultimate goal is to create a new venture or licensing opportunity for program participants.”

Richard Moore, BD DiagnosticsROCKVILLE AND BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, August 26, 2013 – BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a regional private-public partnership focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Central Maryland, announced today its selection of Richard Moore, M.D., Ph.D., as a new Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Technology Transfer (OTT). BHI and BD established this position in July 2013. Dr. Moore, an executive with decades of experience in diagnostics development and technology strategy, will help support the development of new start-up companies and product commercialization based upon innovative technologies selected via OTT license agreements.

Howard County will spend $400,000 over the next two years on a program designed to accelerate the commercialization of new technology developed by the county’s scientists, the Baltimore Sun reported.

County Executive Kenneth Ulman, who is running for lieutenant governor as the running mate of Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, announced the program Thursday, which is a new partnership between the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the Howard County Economic Development Authority.

Only in the distorted reality of startups and venture capital would this plan seem daring: Mhelpdesk.com LLC is refusing outside cash, operating lean and scaling with its own revenue. Instead of holding its hand out to investors, the Dulles-based field-service software startup has opted to pour its efforts into selling, meanwhile leaving their equity intact.

Emergent Biosolutions (EBS) is a commercial stage biotech that produces the only FDA approved anthrax vaccine. The company derives nearly all of its revenue from sales of BioThrax, its only marketed product, to the US Government. Currently, nearly all of Emergent’s revenue comes from a contract with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that ends in September 2016.

To a cautious investor, a company with a single customer is bathed in red light. However, Emergent is attempting a transition. Lets see how its going.

Johns Hopkins has often been honored with respectable titles, but none quite as prestigious as the one bestowed on the school by the Academic Ranking of World Universities this year. Named the No. 4 best medical school in the world, Johns Hopkins professes an impeccable record of remarkable alum and highly cited researchers, not to mention its other claim to fame: top hospital in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The ARWU ranked institutions according to a series of indicators and weights, scoring schools on their academic or research performance in the field of medicine. The ranking — developed by the Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University — looked at the number of alums who have won Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine since ’61; staff who have won Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine since ’71; cited researchers in the categories of Clinical Medicine, Pharmacology, and Social Sciences; articles indexed in Science Citation Index and the percentage of papers actually published in the top 20 percent of medicine journals.