Jessica Schladweiler, Sr. Director of Strategic Accounts, Vantedge Medical

Jessica Schladweiler, Sr. Director of Strategic Accounts at Vantedge Medical, brings a clinically grounded perspective to the commercial team and a career-long focus on helping improve patient outcomes.

Her curiosity for how things work started early, growing up as the light-holder and tool-runner for her father, an engineer and natural teacher. That hands-on exposure to problem-solving, combined with a passion for helping people, led Jessica to earn a degree and begin her career in Exercise Physiology.

Jessica moved into the cardiorespiratory diagnostics space, building experience across technical support, sales, leadership, and commercial strategy, continually moving closer to the manufacturing side of MedTech and into the world of contract manufacturing.

With a genuine passion for contract manufacturing, working at Vantedge continues to give her the opportunity to stay close to new, cutting-edge MedTech devices as they move through the product lifecycle.  At the heart of her work, however, is the same conviction that shaped her earliest career choices: helping people, and improving patients’ lives.

What initially attracted you to the medtech industry? How has your perspective on the industry evolved over the course of your career?

My path into MedTech wasn’t a straight line. It was shaped by curiosity and a deep-rooted desire to help people. Playing a part in bringing an industry-disrupting technology to life is incredibly exciting, and connecting that hard work with real patient outcomes is the real reward.

What has evolved most profoundly is my perspective on what actually accelerates innovation. Early in my career, I focused on products, processes, and performance metrics. Over time, I’ve come to believe that relationships and partnerships are what fuel innovation faster, smarter, and more cost-effectively than anything else. When trust exists between partners, problems are surfaced earlier, creative solutions are explored more freely, and the path from concept to patient impact is shorter for everyone.

MedTech companies that will lead the next decade aren’t just investing in the best technology. They’re investing in the right partnerships; building the deep, collaborative relationships that turn good ideas into life-changing outcomes.

As a seasoned professional in the industry, how do you envision the future of medtech? What emerging technologies or trends do you believe will have the most significant impact?

The trend I find most exciting, and probably most telling about where MedTech is headed, is the rise of device-specific strategic partnerships.

For a long time, if a large MedTech company wanted access to a new technology or capability, the answer was often M&A. That can work, but it is also slow, expensive, and disruptive. What we are seeing now is a more focused model: partnerships built around a specific technology or product line that let companies bring complementary strengths together without taking on the complexity of a full acquisition.

Imaging and robotic-assisted surgery are a great example. When robotics platforms and advanced imaging companies work together, they can create more connected systems that combine precision, visualization, and real-time information in ways that would be much harder to build alone.

To me, that is where things get interesting. The companies that will shape the next generation of surgical and diagnostic technology will be the ones that know how to build the right partnerships, stay focused on the desired clinical outcomes they’re after, and move quickly enough to turn those strategic partnerships into transformative or industry disrupting products that’ll change patients’ lives.

In your opinion, what areas or applications within medtech have the greatest potential for growth and innovation? Why do you consider them promising?

Robotic-assisted surgery stands out to me as having the greatest near-term growth potential in MedTech, not because of where it is today, but because of where it’s going. The current list of approved indications is quite short in the grand scheme of all surgical categories, and the expansion runway ahead is significant. As platforms mature and clinical evidence grows, the procedures that can benefit from robotic precision, consistency, and minimally invasive access will continue to multiply.

What excites me even more is the broader ecosystem taking shape around surgical and diagnostic technology. We are moving toward a future where the full care pathway can be compressed into a single visit or a dramatically shortened series of touchpoints. The integration of AI-driven clinical outcome assessment with physician expertise and risk evaluation is making it possible to develop interventional plans faster, and to measure, refine, and validate those plans in real time.

When imaging, diagnostics, robotics, AI, and real-world HCP experience come together in a truly integrated ecosystem, the result isn’t just better technology; it’s a fundamentally different and better experience for the patient and the physician. That convergence is where I believe the most transformative growth in MedTech will happen.

From a broader perspective, how do you see the role of medtech engineering in shaping the future of healthcare? What impact do you anticipate it will have on patient care and outcomes?

Human Factors Engineering is an often-overlooked part of MedTech engineering, but I think it will be one of the most important forces shaping the future of MedTech and healthcare delivery as human-robot interaction, AI, and connected technologies continue to advance.

At its core, Human Factors Engineering helps keep the focus on the problem that actually needs to be solved: the unmet clinical need, the person using the device, and the environment in which it will be used. It pushes teams to design around those realities, not just around what is technically possible. That matters because a device can be technically impressive and still fall short if it is difficult to use, unintuitive, or poorly suited to the clinical environment.

When HFE principles and engineers are integrated early and work alongside engineering, clinical, and commercial teams, they can help make sure everyone is solving the same problem from the start. The result is a device or technology that is safer, with better patient outcomes and excellent user adoption.

As MedTech moves toward more connected, AI-enabled, and robotics-driven solutions, the interaction between people and technology will only become more complex.

Embracing Human Factors Engineering helps ensure that as the technology advances, it remains grounded in how physicians, clinicians, and patients will actually use it.  That, to me, is where some of the biggest opportunities to improve patient care will come from.

Considering the increasing importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, how do you think medtech engineers can effectively collaborate with professionals from other fields, such as medicine and computer science, to drive innovation in the industry?

Interdisciplinary collaboration in MedTech is incredibly powerful, but it does not always start in the right place. One of the biggest mistakes I see is teams jumping to ‘solutioning’ before they are fully aligned on the problem they are trying to solve.

Intended use, use environment, user needs, requirements, and desired outcomes all need to be clearly understood across engineering, clinical, software, commercial, and manufacturing teams. When that alignment is incomplete, the issues often do not show up right away. They surface later during systems integration, prototyping, production, or launch, when they are much harder and more expensive to address.

The strongest programs I have seen keep coming back to those shared goals throughout development. When all disciplines are anchored to the same intended outcomes and user needs, cross-functional collaboration at the execution level is much smoother. Teams make decisions faster, solve problems more openly, and work together with a clearer sense of purpose.

In contract manufacturing, that alignment is especially important. We sit between many of those disciplines, so part of our job is to understand what each team is trying to achieve and help keep those priorities connected as the product moves from concept toward commercialization.