From Medical Devices to People Centric Solutions

When you listen to great leaders, you get great perspectives! That’s what happened in last 3 days at the The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed 2025 at San Diego. I was privileged to listen and talk to great leaders such as Tom Polen Kevin Lobo Sonal Matai Geoff Martha Ivan Tornos Antoinette Gawin Michael “Mick” Farrelland multiple others and got to understand the direction in which the healthcare industry is moving. Here is a summary of my learnings-

1. Patient Centricity – Patients have always been at the core of the entire healthcare system. This is more evident than ever today. When Ivan Tornos , the CEO of Zimmer Biomet, spoke about not using the word patient anymore, but calling them people, it immediately struck a chord. Geoff Marthatalked about having patient celebration days for long time and how other companies are adopting the same approach.
2. AI and Gen AI role – Almost all leaders spoke about how AI is helping them in producing better solutions, saving providers’ time, enhancing their productivities and giving more power and options to the patients. Kevin Lobo, the CEO of Stryker and many other leaders spoke in detail about the immense power that these technologies bring in.
3. Devices to solutions- Tom Polen, the CEO of BD, talked in detail about how companies such as BD is not looking at medical devices as standalone machines. They are just a part of entire solution around a therapeutic area and these devices work in conjunction with software solutions, AI algorithms, applications and monitoring techniques.
4. Continuous healthcare – Focus is shifting from a point intervention to a continuous monitoring environment during a healthcare episode or otherwise. Tim Patzdemonstrated a solution that can be used for continuous blood pressure monitoring using a much simple approach than the traditional approach being used for decades.
5. Simple is beautiful – Sonal Mataimade a very relevant comment that “Simple is beautiful”. When we think of healthcare, we think of large bulky devices, complicated prescriptions, difficult to understand test results and all that. It need not be like this. We should not be over engineering healthcare, rather our focus should be simplifying it for every human being in this world.

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