The Name on the Instrument: A Field Guide for the Surgeon Inventor

The eponym was the paycheck.

Cushing, the Mayo brothers, DeBakey and Rhoton were paid in names, not royalties. Today a surgeon with a better idea faces patents that may not survive a fight, innovation offices that promise more than they deliver, validation bills larger than a house payment, and a purchasing system that makes the inventor's own hospital the hardest sale of all.

Alexander C. Ebner has spent his career on the other side of the table, as the manufacturer surgeons bring their ideas to. This is the conversation he has had hundreds of times, written down once, properly: what an idea is worth, what it costs, who owns it, how to build it, and why you should do it anyway.

Part memoir and part field manual, The Name on the Instrument walks a surgical instrument from a clinical complaint to the operating room: protecting the idea, negotiating with the innovation office, the quality system nobody sees, sourcing the right manufacturer, FDA clearance, the conflict of interest freeze at your own hospital, evidence based adoption, and the GPO wall. It closes with seven of the author's own instruments and the complaints that produced them.

Written for surgeons, residents and fellows, biomedical engineers, medical device professionals, and anyone who teaches or works in technology transfer.

The name on the instrument was always the prize. The money was always the hard part.