New Cleveland Clinic innovation director shares thoughts

Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the commercialization arm of Cleveland Clinic, has named Gary Fingerhut as executive director.

Fingerhut has served as acting executive director since April and previously served two years as Innovations’ general manager of information technology commercialization.

HIT is the fastest growing sector of Cleveland Clinic Innovations’ portfolio of 66 spin-off companies, including Cleveland-based Explorys, a big data leader that has quickly grown to more than 100 employees in four years.

This year, Innovations saw its Healthcare Innovation Alliance--a coalition that includes some of the most renowned healthcare organizations--grow to seven members. Innovations also made news this year for spinning off Shield Biotech, which is working to develop a preventive breast cancer vaccine.

During his first two years with Innovations, Fingerhut drove high growth to its HIT portfolio, spinning off three companies--iVHR, iComet and Talis Clinical. Fingerhut will continue to serve as Innovations’ general manager of IT commercialization.

During an interview with Clinical Innovation + Technology, Fingerhut said he intends to enhance inventors’ experience. “We’re always looking for ways to do more with less. A lot of the innovation that meets the needs of patients can be accomplished by more efficiency.”

Fingerhut said he sees successful innovations from other industries impacting healthcare. “Big data is the perfect example.” After success in the finance and other industries, big data can help provide better care, he said.

Cleveland Clinic’s “secret sauce,” he said, has been its ability to take innovation “from the bench to the bedside by leveraging our global alliance partnership. We have many constituents we can bring to the table to test products and concepts.”

The organization has “a 13-year tested process around the stages of innovation that has proven to be very successful,” said Fingerhut.

Over the years, Fingerhut said he’s seen a heavy increase in health IT in general but a “tremendous amount of activity in the –omics space (ie: genomics). Also, I see a lot of back office capabilities around making operations more efficient. There has been high growth in many areas.”

Doing more with less is second to providing better patient care, he said, and “we’ve seen a tremendous increase in solutions that do just that by focusing on better patient engagement, better documentation and providing value-based outcomes.”

Fingerhut, who has more than 30 years of technical and management leadership experience in the software industry, serves on the board of directors of spin-off companies ImageIQ, Enforcer, Talis and iVHR. Prior to joining Innovations, he helped co-found a global software company and was a senior executive of a software-development and technology-consulting firm.