INNOVATION AT DEVICETALKS BOSTON
Osso VR co-founder and CEO Justin Barad thinks there’s a medtech innovation bottleneck when it comes to ensuring health providers are using new technology to produce better results. “How do we get more people to use these technologies, and how do we get them to do it more correctly?”
Boston Scientific SVP and President of Urology Meghan Scanlon addressed innovation in medtech: “You have to create the evidence, the awareness and the buzz over time.” Adding that companies have to do it authentically. Scanlon later said, “Start with the data.”Sagentia Innovation Medical Managing Partner Duncan Smith spoke on the potential for medtech innovation to contribute to a sustainable future. “Just by good, solid system engineering, you can have a radical impact on sustainability.” As a first step, “you have to choose a goal that’s meaningful for your organization.”
The biggest change in musculoskeletal since COVID is the transition to the ambulatory surgery center, said Zimmer Biomet Chief Science, Technology and Innovation Officer Dr. Nitin Goyal. “We’re talking about 45% growth over the next five years.”FundamentalVR co-founder and CEO Richard Vincent spoke on the benefits of their virtual reality (VR) solution for surgical training. “We’ve seen that VR has been proven to accelerate learning, and haptic VR has been proven to accelerate skill transfer and acquisition.” VR can achieve significant logistic time and cost savings, he said: “It allows us to continue to provide opportunities to learn.”
While pulsed-field ablation is a trending topic in medtech, treating atrial fibrillation (AFib) with gold-standard methods can be a long process. Boston Scientific Chair and CEO Mike Mahoney thinks AFib treatment could become a 45-minute outpatient procedure within a few years because of continued innovation in interventional surgery. “The interventional space is a great benefit in the long term for any company,” he said. “We try to disrupt surgery.”