Maria Shepherd: Where to go for the best medtech meetings?

By Maria Shepherd, MedExecWomen co-founder and president and founder of Medi-Vantage 

What the real estate agents say about buying property also applies to medtech meetings: location, location, location. Whenever someone asks me where the best meetings are, I always tell them to look in Boston.

Location matters in choosing a meeting venue. In Boston, you have major medtech companies like Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Hologic, Thermo Fisher, Fresenius, Insulet, the list goes on and on. There are world-class hospitals developing new medical procedures and biotech and pharmaceutical companies working on new classes of drugs and gene therapies.

All of this creates the critical mass needed to sustain an ecosystem that makes meeting managers look twice at Boston to host their meetings, to be sure they get the registration numbers they need to ensure their meeting is a success.

Two of my favorite meetings in Boston are the MedExecWomen meeting and DeviceTalks.

Full disclosure: I am a co-founder of MedExecWomen, a community of executive women in medtech that has been gratifyingly successful. However, MedExecWomen represents a small segment of the medtech ecosystem (too small, which is why I started MedExecWomen to pull more women up into medtech executive management). The MedExecWomen meeting is very future oriented to provide our audience strategic insights on medtech trends that are imminent but practical so they can apply those learnings to their businesses the next day, week or month.

I turn to other meetings to get a full overview of current trends in medtech. One of those meetings is DeviceTalks Boston.

DeviceTalks Boston

The team at DeviceTalks works hard to make their sessions instructive and entertaining, but one DeviceTalks Boston 2024 session in particular was also humorous and informative.

Rajit Kamal, Medtronic VP & GM, Surgical Robotics, gave a powerful presentation on the future of robotics and remote surgery in a joint keynote at DeviceTalks Boston and the Robotics Summit & Expo to an at-capacity audience.

In the presentation, he showed the audience the Hugo robot, located offsite, that was prepped to do a simulated surgery — in this case, a “pepperectomy” — by DeviceTalks Editorial Director Tom Salemi, who performed what Holly Scott of the Mullings Group called “the most impressive pepper tumor removal I have seen.”

After this presentation, everyone in the audience understood the funny, but powerful message Rajit was delivering; that remote surgery would provide healthcare for people all over the world even if skilled surgeons were not locally available.

DeviceTalks covers all of medtech, providing executive presentations from leading companies like Becton Dickinson, Stryker and GE HealthCare, midsize medtech and startups supplied courtesy of Medtech Innovator.

DeviceTalks Boston topics are largely current but provide a deep and thorough review of information for a broad audience. I was impressed by the session on how IP can drive funding and exits featuring a panel of medtech VCs, CEOs and IP attorneys who covered strategies for aligning medtech companies with the needs of investors, collaborators, and acquirers. Those of us that have been in the industry for a while know that IP is a critical success factor for medtech companies to get funding, seek strategic partners, and exit through an M&A or IPO. Our industry is litigious and understanding the best practices and hazards to avoid when building a patent portfolio is imperative to remain competitive, gain funding, and reach a successful exit.

MedExecWomen

MedExecWomen is dedicated to empowering women in leadership roles in the medical device, diagnostics, drug delivery, and digital healthcare industries by arming female executives with relevant skills and robust networks.

The first conference for the MedExecWomen meeting was held in 2019 with 83 women attending. There was no PR and news about the meeting was spread through word-of-mouth only. Five years later, the MedExecWomen meeting has grown to 200 women. Attendees report that the meeting is inspirational with topics they are unlikely to find elsewhere. This feedback matches our goal of developing a one-day meeting of unique strategic content and networking that allows executive women to build a community.

For example, the women pictured here (from left) are Rebecca Schechter, SVP, GM DAX at Nuance (a Microsoft company); Jennifer Kozak, VP of new business development at Johnson & Johnson MedTech; and Heather Knight, EVP and group president at Baxter International, Inc. Their 2023 MedExecWomen meeting panel covered the implications of multi-billion-dollar acquisitions in medtech.

After reviewing the Nuance/Microsoft, Abiomed/J&J and HillRom/Baxter deals, the panel concluded that medtech companies have used and will continue to use M&A as a key strategic switch to drive industry change and boost superior financial performance. Enhanced clinical solutions, larger portfolios, global expansion, the impact of technical change (and AI therein) and increased leverage and scale are some of the primary drivers underlying recent medtech M&A activity.

They also affirmed that M&A deals will resume a vital role in the medtech ecosystem, and our companies will gain by curating their strategic vision and developing method to anticipate and minimize the effects of shocks and stresses of future events. This means companies on both sides of the deal will need to assess their corporate strategies, optimize their dealmaking approaches, and de-risk to fortify their financial positions.

We endeavor to have unique content at the MedExecWomen meeting. A fireside chat called “Mars vs. Venus – Gender Differences in Driving Innovation” was hosted by our board member, Leslie Storms, U.S. president at Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy Synthes, featuring Anika Therapeutics President and CEO Cheryl Blanchard and former CVRx CEO Nadim Yared, chair of the board of NAMSA and a board member of AdvaMed. It was a debate exploring the importance of diversity in fostering innovation and discussing differences between male and female leaders in their ability to drive an innovative culture.

At the end of the day, I choose both meetings as favorites because they are uniquely different, and rich in content that brings value to their individual constituencies. There are many other meetings in the Boston area, and I invite you to check them all out!

The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s only and do not necessarily reflect those of Medical Design & Outsourcing or its employees.