The price of innovation does not need to be high and with the current economic environment and rising costs of health care, it is doubtful that expensive solutions to common orthopedic problems will be feasible or sustainable when increased in scale. We need to focus more attention on how to improve our resourcefulness and collaboration with other medical disciplines to foster creative and innovative low-cost solutions to challenging problems. The examples discussed here of dilute Betadine lavage, CRP assays, and vancomycin powder are recent and relevant examples in the orthopedic literature that show that these solutions can and do exist. Furthermore, these existing technologies warrant further research across additional orthopedic specialties to improve the quality of patient care without the additional cost. Translational research has become a cornerstone of modern medicine and is often described as the synthesis of basic and applied research in order to take basic science advancements and turn them into clinical treatments in a “bench-to-bedside” model. What we should not forget is that translation can take many forms and that discovering new applications to existing technologies may represent a form of translational research in orthopedics that can improve our field within the framework of healthcare reform. Future solutions may exist by looking at the past, but only if we keep our eyes open for them.
Author's Disclosure Statement. The author reports no actual or potential conflict of interest in relation to this article.
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