“We couldn’t be more proud of how the team really showed our values,” BD CEO Tom Polen said during a keynote at DeviceTalks Boston.

Tom Polen’s original “master plan” included medical school. While preparing for the MCAT out of undergrad, he instead joined a small startup based in California.

The startup grew and BD (NYSE:BDX) ultimately bought it. That was about 23 years ago.

Polen is now chair, president and CEO of the medtech giant, having assumed the role in early 2020.

In the last three years, BD has acquired 19 companies  — much like his startup many years before.

“It’s a pleasure to be able to stand in front of those teams when we bring them in as part of our family and say, ‘I came to BD the same way that all of you came to BD,'” Polen said. “I remember exactly the way that that first day felt.”

Speaking in a keynote address at DeviceTalks Boston today, Polen outlined his career path and his tenure at BD. Polen led BD through the COVID-19 pandemic, steered the company through a strategy fueled by tuck-in M&A, and is now pushing toward areas like smart connected care.

“It’s always been my goal to just make the biggest impact in healthcare and biggest impact on the company that I can,” Polen said.

Taking over at BD just before COVID-19

Polen recalls being approached by people apologizing that he took over the corner office at BD within two months of the COVID-19 pandemic hitting.

He said he always had a different view.

“What an unbelievable time to become CEO at one of the world’s largest, most impactful medical technology companies in a pandemic, where our purpose gets to be fulfilled more so than ever before,” Polen said. “I couldn’t be more proud of our organization and how we did that.”

When the pandemic hit, Polen said he set three goals for BD. He wanted the company to help diagnose people, help people get healthy and help people get vaccinated.

“We never took our eye off the ball,” he said. “We’re really happy with the progress we made.”

BD developed rapid diagnostics for COVID-19, scaling production of rapid tests from 9 million per year to 12 million per month. Within a year, the company produced 2 billion additional syringes to help vaccinate people against COVID-19 around the world. Polen said the company created custom solutions for PPE shortages during the pandemic.

“We couldn’t be more proud of how the team really showed our values,” Polen explained. “… Crisis doesn’t build character. It reveals character, and this was certainly a crisis where we saw the character being revealed.”

Where Polen wants to take the company

BD 2025 is what the company calls its “current phase of value creation.” It features three key pillars: grow, simplify and empower.

“BD has had a great ability to identify future trends, get ahead of those trends and create significant new growth opportunities for the company while transforming healthcare,” Polen said.

The company has big plans for driving access to care through its diagnostics business. It also aims to advance its pharmaceutical systems business. Polen said BD invested $1.2 billion in capacity for the business in December 2020 as part of an effort to prepare for a new wave of biologics coming to market. That capacity is going live right now, he said.

BD is also continuing its tuck-in M&A strategy, acquiring point-of-care or at-home technologies to “meaningfully improve chronic disease outcomes,” Polen said.

“What we’ve been doing very systematically is shifting BD into those higher growth spaces that are transforming the future of healthcare, both organically and inorganically,” he said. “We’ve been making tremendous progress in shaping our portfolio into these higher growth spaces.”