The Mayo Clinic over the past century has pioneered everything from heart-lung machines to patient monitoring to high-speed CT scanning. As one of the most respected nonprofit academic medical centers in the world, the Mayo Clinic continues to innovate.

A major center of innovation at the Rochester, Minn.–based practice is its Division of Engineering, where a staff of 67 engineers, technicians, designers, machinists — and even a glassblower — create new medical devices under an FDA-compliant quality management system.

“Our mission is to create unique medical devices to enhance patient care and advance medical research,” Mark Wehde, the technology management section head that Mayo Clinic Division of Engineering, told dozens of device industry insiders at DeviceTalks Minnesota last month. [Discover more medtech insights at DeviceTalks West, Dec. 9–10, 2019 in Santa Clara, Calif.]

“We haven’t been asked to save Mayo money by making things less expensively, and we haven’t been asked to make things that somebody else already makes. We’ve been asked to help create new devices in order to better serve our patients,” Wehde said.

Here are some examples Wehde shared of innovative medtech under development at the Mayo Clinic Division of Engineering.

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