Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to make waves across the medtech industry as more companies apply it within their technologies.
Several leading medtech executives spoke of the impact of AI across a range of purposes, including for internal optimization purposes and for enhancing their medical device offerings, this week at AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference in San Diego.
Here is what many of those leaders had to say on AI across multiple panels, discussions and interviews.
Medtronic CEO Geoff Martha
“The innovation opportunities in medtech are the best they’ve been since I’ve been a part of it,” Martha said. “When you put AI in there and add robotics — and when I think of robotics, I’m not just thinking about these big mainframe robots. I’m thinking also about catheter systems … That’s all going to be automated. The innovation in medtech is going to continue to do really well, but you need to have that ecosystem.”
“We’ve got a lot of FDA-approved AI. I really feel like it helps to make our business more efficient. I hear all these great case studies from all kinds of companies around the world, in different industries, and I kind of feel like we’ve got to move even faster.”
Olympus CEO Bob White
“[When] you think about the role of AI in healthcare, it’s gonna be central to what Olympus does. There won’t be a GI suite anywhere around the world that’s not impacted by AI. [We just launched] Olysense, which, as a shorthand way to think about it, is an AI-enabled ecosystem for the GI suite and connecting it. So it’s not just technology. Yes, the polyp detections through AI allow the doctors to see polyps better. But it’s more than that.”
“What you’re seeing, if you step back and look at Olympus, you say, ‘I get it. They’re going to invest a lot in innovation and technology along the continuum.’ But, we’re going to do that both organically and inorganically, so you should expect to see both.”
Stryker CEO Kevin Lobo
“Bringing AI to bring science to surgery is some huge focus area for us in the innovation angle. [We also look at] ambient intelligence. … In our case, we bought Care.AI and Vocera, two technology companies. Five years ago, I would have never thought I’d be buying an AI company, but what it does is it actually has sensors, and it’s watching what’s going on in the patient rooms, and that helps create alerts that go into a badge on a nurse to … prevent falls, as an example. But the use cases on ambient intelligence is incredible. [We] think about what that can actually do in an operating room to drive efficiencies, to know when the case is about to end, before the next case starts. So we have a huge pipeline in R&D around ambient intelligence to bring more solutions to our customers.”
Insulet CEO Ashley McEvoy
“Our product absolutely relies on taking advantage of where the world of AI is going,” McEvoy said. “With Omnipod, you wear it 24/7 and get data 24/7. To make sure that’s cyber-secure and private and can use machine learning and the right, responsible algorithms, data governance is a newer thing that we’ve been standing up.
“We’re very much in a learning mode. It’s also really important that we set it into our product, getting the balance of cultural capabilities as well as innovation and staying apprised of how we stay in the cutting edge of patient care. That’s really the balance we’re trying to strike within the company.”
Masimo CEO Katie Szyman
“[In] the electronic ICU, where you have one person trying to monitor 50 patients, a very simple application of AI that we’ve seen and that we’re developing is, instead of having to look at all patients equally, like all 50 patients equally, we’re able to actually use AI to get to scale. So, you can actually monitor 300-500 patients at once, because the AI is scanning all the data, and it’s only showing the person watching the patients that are in at-risk situations. So, instead of having a screen where you’re looking at 50 numbers, you’re actually have a screen where you look at five, and those are the five that AI has already identified as being at risk.”
“It’s phenomenal to see actually the patient result and the fact that we can have AI running and that it can actually improve hospital care so much. In the back office, being able to write regulatory submissions using AI to write it all for you, I think it’s phenomenal, and it will be really great, because we should be able to really accelerate and get things more standardized. … That’s part of the areas where we’ve got to get more creative and allowing our teams to use more of some of the writing AI capabilities that are out there, because we’re all so afraid that all day it’s going to be fake writing, but if it makes it better and faster…”
Hologic CEO Steve MacMillan
“[It] can be very fatiguing on the radiologists looking through so many different images. That ability to just screen and use machine learning, moving into the AI world, you’re able to distill the images down and say ‘look at this slide three in the upper left quadrant,’ instead of looking at hundreds of slides. And when you just think about this simple piece. What was fascinating is that, when we started talking about radiologists a decade ago, they were very threatened by the idea of machine learning and AI. Over time, they’ve watched it and started to see that this is a real enabler to make my job easier and also better. It’s been fascinating, certainly starting with breast cancer screening, and then we’ve taken it more recently to cervical cancer screening for the pap tests. … In our field of diagnostics, it’s just incredibly rich and very timely.”
Dexcom interim CEO Jake Leach
“I just continue to be impressed by what our teams are putting together. … Our belief is that AI is going to help us drive further engagement with our products. What we’ve shown in many clinical studies and real world data is, the more people engage with their health, the better the outcome. Monitoring is this interesting technology where you get a real-time feed of your body’s reaction to food, activity, stress, sleep, and it’s quite engaging, as is the data itself. But, I often get asked, especially as we’re going to broader and broader groups, ‘what do I do with that? What’s it going to do for me?’ AI is the engine we’re starting to use to really drive insights for everybody, not just people with diabetes.”
Resmed CEO Mick Farrell
“The digital revolution is coming to Planet Earth, whether you want it to or not. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, they have been around [for a long time]. I went to MIT in the late 90s. It was 40 years before that, the term artificial intelligence was first coined at MIT somewhere in the 50s, and they were well ahead of their time. They were decades ahead. That idea that a machine can learn and a machine can pivot itself within certain boundaries with a human start, it’s not truly artificial, but GenAI is going to take the world to the next level.
“We’re putting the tech into medtech. We’re going to have cloud connectivity and going to empower the 10.3 million patients that have signed up for MyAir, our patient app. Importantly, we’re going to use this next generation of technology, this machine learning AI, and particularly GenAI, and we’re going to liberate the data to the cloud, and then we’re going to allow those data to be empowering to you, the patient, so they can become a part of it.
“I think ResMed and other med tech companies are going to invest to become health concierges to help people find their pathways along. Using technology and digital is absolutely the way to go. I think it’s the way of the future. You either embrace Gen AI, or it’s existential, or your company won’t exist in and so you have to embrace it in the right way.”
