Doug McCormack, OrthoCare Innovations’ CEO. Photograph courtesy of OrthoCare Innovations.
The National Defense Authorization Act for the 2010 fiscal year includes an item that could lead to a great leap forward in O&P technology: $8 million for a proposed military-to-commercial technology-transfer center to be headed by OrthoCare Innovations, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
The proposed Rehabilitation Technology Transition Center project was spearheaded by OrthoCare, with support from other Oklahoma stakeholders, including the Francis Tuttle Technology Center, Presbyterian Health Foundation, and the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. The center was conceived to focus on the transfer of technology from military research projects into the private sector, and could house collaborations among the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense (DOD), Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), and the Veterans Administration (VA).
Doug McCormack, OrthoCare CEO, told The O&P EDGE, “There has been a tremendous investment on the part of the federal government in the development of new prosthetic technologies, particularly since the start of the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, the government has had a really poor track record in successfully transitioning technology out of government labs or leveraging the federal investment to realize significant new technologies.” The proposed center would address these problems, according to McCormack, by creating cross pollination between the most advanced military rehabilitation research and current commercial technology, combining the best of both worlds into production products. McCormack contends that not only would the civilian population benefit from the collaboration, but military and veteran patients would also see more advanced care opportunities.
The proposed center is still just a legislative blueprint. It has the vocal support of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the number-two-ranked Republican on the Armed Services Committee, but the National Defense Authorization Act is still in Senate hearings and will have to pass through both the Senate and House, plus presidential signing, to become reality. In addition, McCormack says, the authorization act “has hundreds and hundreds of these types of projects and initiatives, plus the funding for the entire military, so our fate will be determined by the overall legislation. But we feel very, very good about the project’s chances. Bigger issues for us will be conferencing with the House and then ultimately working out how the dollars flow through the Department of Defense to our organization.”
