Welcome. I'm your host, Kathleen Koch, former longtime Washington correspondent and best-selling author. And we're thrilled to have you join Fast Company's podcast, A New Frontier in Healthcare. How technology is transforming lives.
Imagine AI working hand in glove with doctors to spot even the most hard to detect colon cancers or a minimally invasive surgical procedure that reduces a patient's blood pressure. I mean, it sounds like science fiction, right? But tech breakthroughs like those are now reality and opening a new era in healthcare. That's the topic of this conversation today in partnership with Medtronic. Well, to learn more about what's
possible and how health tech executives are navigating this dynamic landscape. I'm joined by Jeff Martha Chairman and CEO of Medtronic and Ken Washington, CTO of Medtronic. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you, Kathleen. It's great to be here.
Yes, thanks, Kathleen. I'm really excited about the conversation with you and Kat. Well, I'm really excited to dig right in here. So, Jeff Medtronic this year marks its 75th anniversary. And you've been CEO for the last five years. You took the helm at such an incredibly difficult time. Just as the pandemic was striking, what would you say have been your key takeaways from this experience?
Well, it's been a very dynamic couple of years with the pandemic and geopolitics, social discord. And at the same time, on a more positive note, you have just tremendous advancements of technology. And of course, we're a technology company, a healthcare company, but also a technology company.
So if I had to summarize it, in times like these, especially over the last five years, what I realized is just how important it is for a company to have a true North Star. Yeah. And you really know who you are as a company and what you stand for as a company. It's a little different than strategy. In Medtronic, we call it our mission. Our mission was written by our founder in 1960. And not a word has changed. It's a pretty comprehensive mission. That's amazing.
written in 1960, and it still applies today. It gets into things like, you know, putting patients first, and that was, I think, obvious back then. It gets into quality integrity, but it also gets into being a good corporate citizen and recognizing in the communities that you were in and recognizing the worth of employees. In 1960, those are now concepts that a lot of companies embraced, but 1960, that wasn't thought, really. And so it is, for us at Medtronic, it really defines who we are. It guides our strategy.
Right? Strategies change over time. You know, not hopefully not every year, but every couple of years you got to update your strategy and it guides day-to-day decisions, you know, but it also inspires us. So it defines us who we are, our North Star, it guides us strategically and it inspires us. So having that was a real framework to make some really important decisions over that pandemic. Case and point what we had to do with ventilator during the beginning of the pandemic.
So what, what did happen? What did you have to do with ventilators at the beginning of the pandemic? Well, if you remember, you know, the being ventilators were equal to life. At the beginning of the pandemic, when people were admitted to the hospital, the clinical community really was putting a lot of these patients on ventilators and demand for ventilators.
went up, you know, astronomically high overnight. And these aren't like consumer products. The supply chain is rather bespoke and it had been a kind of sleepy low growth kind of segment and all of a sudden it exploded. And at the time we were like one third of the world's critical care ventilators.
So what we did is we made a decision to one open source to explain here some of the constraints we have to scaling and open it up to everybody. A tech company does not typically open source their intellectual property and their know how.
moment for society, we wanted to answer the bell. We open sourced, we dramatically invested in a business that for us was kind of small and from a financial standpoint, not that profitable. We dramatically invested in it. We scaled up our production like 5x in a couple of months and took on partners.
to help us do this, unlikely partners like SpaceX, but also various other technology companies like Intel, et cetera, to help us scale it. And we dropped our prices and it was one place globally. So we didn't play favorites with customers. And we dictated who got them by where the disease was most acute. So a lot of these things go counterintuitive to a for-to-profit organization. But this was a big moment. And in the end, it made our company better.
What an extraordinary story. Talk about good corporate citizenship. Wow. Again, I'd like to bring you in here. Could you share with us your journey? I understand your metronics first, CTO, and you came to the company from a pretty diverse professional background.
Thanks, Kathleen. And my background is the one common thread and all of it is technology. I've been a technologist my whole career my whole life. I can't remember a time when I wasn't thinking about and just tinkering with and diving into tech. And so my experiences span aerospace where I worked on a pretty important mission for keeping the world safe. And then I moved to automotive working and helping people move around, which is also a pretty important mission.
But the key is it helped these companies transform their technology to support their mission to take it to the next level. But what I was really excited about when I heard about metronix desire to hire a CTO, I jumped at it because for me it was all about purpose and mission.
And you just heard Jeff talk about that and I just knew that this was a company that I could just dig into and help them go to the next level by bringing advanced technologies, helping them connect dots and ways that creates new innovations. We're doing just that and it's a really great time to be here.
Jeff Medtronic is the world's largest healthcare technology company. You make vices and therapies to treat more than 70 different health conditions. What would you say are the most revolutionary technologies that we're seeing power innovation and medicine today? And are they all AI related?
There is a lot going on right now. And you mentioned earlier, it's our 75th anniversary in Medtronic. It's unusual for a tech company to not just survive for 75 years, but thrive. And one thing that's unique about us is our ability to create new standards of care for patients.
and scale them around the world. And do that consistently over time, starting in the cardiology space, moving into neurodegenerative diseases, then into diabetes, and then the orthopedics. So it's been a remarkable 75 years. And as your question is, what are you excited about now? What are the revolutionary things out? They all are related.
Look, I'll talk about AI in a second. It's clearly playing a big role, and I'll explain at a high level how it's helping us here at the impact it's having on patients. But not everything is AI-related. A lot of it is just physiological. We're learning more about the human body, and we can apply technology, including AI, but we can apply to technology to solve meaningful health issues for patients in large patient pools.
One I would talk about is atrial fibrillation. So atrial fibrillation is on the rise for people, especially as society ages and as overall society gets wealthier. Look, if you get a little older and you like to have a glass of wine every once in a while, chances are you're going to have AFib. And the current solution is medicine and patients don't like the medicine. It causes side effects and they don't take it and their AFib could really have bad impact on them, including causing strokes and things like that.
We discovered a way with a minimally invasive medical procedure to impact that heart tissue that's causing that AFib and fix it basically. Wow. And this is having a profound impact on patients around the world. So you're shifting from medicines that they don't like to take to a minimally invasive procedure. Same thing with hypertension. That's even a bigger issue. Three out of four adults in the United States do not have their hypertension under control. Again, they don't like taking the medicine.
Side effects, et cetera. We have, again, a new medical procedure that's, again, minimally invasive, mild sedation. Patient is less than an hour. Your blood pressure comes down and we have data going out up to 10 years that shows it's durable. A little bit reduction in your blood pressure is like a 40% reduction in stroke risk or heart attack risk that comes from hypertension. So it's profound.
So these are two examples that AI didn't play a huge role. It's really the learning more about the human body and applying technology. A second theme gets to what we call putting the tech in the med deck. AI, robotics, coming into our space to do profound things. You asked about AI. What it's helping us do is better diagnose things more effectively, like you mentioned colon cancer. Another one is diagnosing AFib. We're using AI to diagnose AFib much more effectively.
Another area for is it's helping us personalize therapies at scale. So areas like Parkinson's, we treat Parkinson's with an implantable stimulator that stimulates structures of your brain that eliminates the symptoms of Parkinson's. And we can personalize that over time by injecting AI.
That's just extraordinary. When I hear them, my late father suffered from Parkinson's and I hear, you know, what potential now that exists now, just to give people their lives back. It's so exciting. Yeah, it's super exciting. Those two themes, the learning that more about the human body, applying technology to it and then taking AI and I'm sure we'll get into robotics, interjecting them in the medical technology and the impact they're having.
Let's go to robotics. Now, and Ken, I'd love for you to talk with us about that, about what are the coming innovations in smart robotics and really hold a promise on the medical front? There's so much happening in the robotic field. I mean, here's the good news. Robotics have been around for a long time, but in the medical robotics space,
We're taking the insights and the learning and the algorithms and the technology from other disciplines in robotics and applying it in MedTech where we can make a big impact and a big difference for our patient outcomes. One of the things that we're really excited about is the blending of AI and robotics together to make robots not only minimally invasive, but make them smarter so that the surgeon can have their cognitive load reduced.
So they can focus on the patient and they can focus on doing things that only the surgeon can do where the robot will assist the surgeon to be a better surgeon. Let me give you an example. In the case of our minimally invasive robotics surgery platform, we call Hugo.
This is a product where the surgeon can sit at the console. They can operate on the patient. While the instrument is being used by the surgeon, behind the scenes, AI technology can tell the surgeon what the tissue is, what it's next to, and whether or not that procedure, the action he or she is about to perform, is going to be the right action.
We're also seeing the possibility of the instruments getting more precise, being able to put multiple hands on the robotic instruments at the point where the instrument actually does the manipulation of the tissue. Imagine having multiple devices just like the surgeon has two hands doing the actual surgery. This sounds like science fiction. We've got products that under development that actually do that.
And that's so exciting because it's going to lead to better patient outcomes and better experiences with a surgeon. So everybody wins. Yeah, it might make people nervous if they thought you were replacing surgeons with robots, but it doesn't sound like that's what's happening.
Yeah, let me be clear and be just really emphasize this point. This is not about replacing surgeons. The analogy I like to use, the experience I had in the automotive industry, you know, you saw a bunch of hype about how self-driving cars are going to replace drivers. People are going to be sleeping in the back seat while the car drives itself. You know, you saw these crazy, you know, predictions of that happening. Well, that was 10 years ago and it's still not happening, right? And so people still drive their own cars. The same thing is going to happen in robotic assisted surgery.
You're still going to have surgeons because you want to have that personal touch and you want to have that interaction and you want to have judgment. And there are some things that you just need a human for and you want to have a human for. But what you're going to see is these gifted surgeons are going to be even better because they're going to be assisted by the technology and assisted by the algorithms that the computers can do better than the humans can do but can't do it alone. They need to do it together with the surgeons.
And the other thing about this is, you know, this is a democratizing technology. So you could see where surgeons who were earlier in their career and haven't had the years of experience of some of their more experienced counterparts can be taught and can learn from watching videos and
interacting remotely by seeing how the surgeons who are more experienced do the procedure. We have a technology called digital touch surgery and records a video of the procedure. And then the surgeon can replay that video and other surgeons can replay that video and learn from it and take insights from it and apply it to the next procedure to make it even better. This is going to revolutionize the field of surgery and make things so much better for patients and better for the surgeons too.
That's just fascinating. So, Jeff, I'd like to talk more about some of the major diseases impacting people globally and what new emerging technologies are excited about that could make a difference. Now, you mentioned hypertension. What else is out there that you'd like to talk about that really has you excited?
I also mentioned atrial fibrillation. So those really common conditions, unfortunately, where medical technology is really coming in and taking the place of the current standard of care. But some other areas I would highlight are chronic pain. I mentioned neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's. I would also add chronic pain. And those are both tied to your brain and spinal cord, your central nervous system.
talking about back pain or back and leg back and leg in particular is so prevalent right doesn't affect it. I know this because I've had it myself. I understand 65 million Americans have experienced it at some point and it can be so debilitating.
Oh, it's, you know, it's the worst. According, I've had it a little bit, not too much. Thank God. But the patients I talked to, it's super debilitating physically, but also mentally. It changes your mental state. And so, you know, we treated a couple of different ways. One, you know, less invasive than surgery. We have a pain stimulator that actually it's an implantable device that blocks
signals to your brain, the pain signals to your brain. And we intercept them in your spinal cord and block the pain signals to your brain. And this is one of those areas that has recently had a big leap forward, where we can stimulate and then listen to your central nervous system to see how it's responding and then adjust the stimulation real time. Fifty times a second, we're interrogating your central nervous system to understand how it's reacting to the therapy.
And so that's very instantaneous. And so that's having a, that we just launched that, it's having a big impact. And then of course surgery and Ken just went into, you know, back surgery has historically been procedure that has two wide of a variety of outcomes. And we're trying to get it to very consistent high quality outcomes and globalize that. And Ken went into what we're doing there with surgery, introducing the combination of robotics and inter-operagimaging and
navigation technologies, all tied together with an AI backbone. We launched this ecosystem, which we call Able, and play on AI and enabling technology. When you go into a spine surgery operating room, you're going to see all this great technology working in concert powered by an AI plan. That's personalizing surgeries for people.
I just want to build on the closed loop technology that Jeff mentioned because what it's important to understand about the importance of this technology and how it's changing people's lives is that the signals that we're interpreting and then acting upon is really complex. And so you could think about this as like picking up a whisper while a jet engine is roaring in your ear.
And so that's the level of detail that this technology is able to allow the device to react to. And so that's not possible if you haven't integrated into the device and the technology, the kinds of advanced algorithms that the
AI revolution is now making possible. Just think about that for a moment and think about how that could be applied in other therapeutic areas to completely change the outcomes that are happening for patients. Jeff and Ken, we're in our final minutes here. What would you say are the greatest challenges you are facing as health executives today, especially as we see so many major societal shifts
Well, I'll start and I'll start maybe from a technology point of view. Many of the technologies that we've been talking about have required us to harness the power of data. And as we've been able to harness the power of data, we've been able to translate that into new ways of assisting surgeons, new ways of assisting clinicians and performing therapies that change patients' lives.
But the amount of data that is available out in the world is orders of magnitude more than the data that we've been able to harness today. And so one of the challenges is going to be how do you harness that data? How do you access it? How do you translate it in the right way so that you can act upon it?
So we're actively working with our partners and with healthcare systems to figure out ways to capture more data responsibly and then to translate that data into forms that we can use to make smarter, better, more capable devices to change and improve the lives of more patients. It's a challenge, but it's a challenge worth going after because it's going to create the future that we see and it's going to unlock the vision that we have for personalized healthcare. Jeff?
The challenge that I think we're actually rising up to is for talent. We talk about these great technologies, but they're all reliant on talent. Innovation is a people-driven business still.
We can talk AI and robotics, but it's still people driven, and we need the best talent in the world, the best tech talent in particular, to make this all happen. And how we're rising to that occasion, because we're competing as a lot of other industries and big tech and all that, is falling back on our mission. We're a tech company that really stands for something. In this case,
you know, helping patients, you know, alleviate pain, restore health and extend their lives. That's part of our mission. And so making sure we're articulating that mission and also giving the world's top talent and opportunity beyond the bleeding edge of technology, but not just innovating for technology sake, you're innovating to help patients and, you know, kind of getting that message out there and bringing that home for our employees.
and tracking your retain these mission critical for us. And I'm pretty p there and very optimistic abou of the talent that we ha
your insights and, of course, the special. Thank you to our partner, Metronic, for making this conversation possible. It's just so exciting to see that so many innovative technologies are not just on the horizon, but available today to begin transforming people's lives. I think we'll bring people a lot of hope. Once again, I'm Kathleen Koch, and on behalf of Fast Company, enjoy the rest of your day.
