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Insights from Cathy Burzik’s 40 years in the healthcare industry

November 8, 2019 By Sarah Faulkner

AdvaMed Cathy Burzik women in medtech

Burzik (center) was honored with AdvaMed’s Lifetime Achievement Award at The Medtech Conference this year in Boston. [Image courtesy of AdvaMed]

From the early days of software development to personalized cell and gene therapies, Cathy Burzik has witnessed a lot of technological evolution over the course of her 40-year career in the healthcare industry. She sat down with DeviceTalks’ former program manager Sarah Faulkner for an interview at AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference this year, where she received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to the field.

When Catherine Burzik accepted a job in 1974 at Kodak, her first assignment was to write software that would control cameras designed to keep tabs on Russia.

“This is way before software was even a field – you didn’t go to school for software engineering, but they were looking for people with critical thinking skills. I got to write the software that controlled the cameras, so I had to learn how to write assembler-level language software,” Burzik explained. “When I think about it, it was pretty fascinating to be on the start of a field.”

Years later, she was asked to join a secret project writing software for the very first clinical chemistry instrument.

“That’s what changed everything for me,” she said.

It was the beginning of Burzik’s wide-ranging 40-year career in healthcare. She went on to oversee the vital sign monitor franchise at Johnson & Johnson, as well as that company’s clinical lab and transfusion markets. She is perhaps most well-known for her stint as president & CEO of Kinetic Concepts. Under her leadership, the company inked a $1.7 billion deal to purchase tissue repair company LifeCell. Eventually, KCI was picked up for $6.1 billion by private equity firm Apax Partners.

Now, after working as a general partner at a venture capital firm, she serves on the board of several companies (large and small), helping to guide organizations through the changes that she sees emerging in healthcare.

Get the full story on our sister site MassDevice.

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