Medtronic's Bold New Digital Vision: Disruption in Medtech for the Everyday World | LSI Europe '22

Transcription

Joe Mullings  0:00  

Good morning, everybody. We've got a fantastic panel set up for you this morning. Scott has arranged and Medtronic is going to be sharing some of their digital perspective on the road ahead. So first, I'd like to welcome the panel who's gonna be joining us today. So first, Mei Chang, who's the SVP of Global and Digital Innovation and Medtronic. Mark Palmer, who is Research Director and Technical Fellow. And Steve gets who's VP of Technology and Platform Innovation. So team Medtronic, thanks for joining me this morning. What was a lot of fun was the meetings up before the session we had going back and forth over the last couple of weeks about there's so many things to chat about, what should we chat about. And we've only got 40 minutes, or 38 minutes, so we'll cut to the chase. So it's really interesting, because Medtronic has had a history of unbelievable innovation. They've led the way in so many discovery, so many technologies over the decades. And I'm really curious to chat with this panel about how do we stand on the shoulders of the analog accomplishments that Medtronic has had over these decades? And then transition as elegantly as possible into the digital world? Because I still don't think anybody's got that figured out yet. We'll dig into that a little bit. I think we're sort of poking into the dark and digital in a good way. And I'm glad we are. So Mei, let's open up this digital transition that everybody's talking about. You're leading the way, what is the road in the near term look like? And what is the road in the long term look like?

Mei Jiang  1:53  

Yeah, Medtronic was founded back in 1914. I, just like HP, I came from HP before I joined Medtronic. It was founded in a small garage in Minneapolis. In the past 73 years, we have been leading in the building the you know, the world class, large profile of analog medical device, interventional tools. And I think this is the biggest assets we have built and who in they made who we are today, the largest leading leader in medtech industry. Moving forward, I think, just like everybody else, how we modernize, digitize our analog devices, breathing new life, new digital life into our analog devices. As a matter of fact, we already have a lot of digitized smarter devices, or smallest devices, like the smallest pacemaker today in the whole world. So we'll continue to modernize our existing capability portfolio in the near term. At the same time, we will also think big, what's next, what's possible in the next 5 10 15 years ahead of us. So what more we can do beyond digitization of our medical interventional tools, creating a digital version of who we have been, there is a lot more to be done there.

Joe Mullings  3:33  

And Steven, Mark, question for both of you, Mark, we'll start with you. As you look at the portfolio that Medtronic has, and again, I'm going to continue to ping off of how do we transition from a analog world to a digital world? And how do we as constructively cannibalize our analog world and answer to shareholders and answer to leadership? How do we do that? What do you think about as you're looking at a new technology, and where can we scale this?

Mark Palmer  4:01  

That's an excellent question, Joe. So I keep thinking back to my football coach, American football, but we're doing push ups in the mud, walk around saying it's a great day to be alive. I feel a little bit like that. Now, we're doing push ups in the mud, trying to figure out how to stay competitive, and how to transition to that next tier of competition. So we look at our portfolio. And what we see is our mission up to this point had been trying to make the management of disease as transparent or invisible to the patient and those around them as possible. So we created these devices that you would implant you'd implant minimally invasive, you wouldn't have an 18 inch scar on your chest, you'd have like something you could cover with a bandaid. The device was autonomous. It was doing its own thing inside the body. You didn't have to think about it. But in the digital age, we need that information back we need that information coming out of the body. So it was autonomous in that Sitting on the edge by itself, we need to be able to interact with more dynamically and collect that information. So, as Mei was saying, making our devices smarter, exposing all the rich data that they were collecting and acting on internally, trying to externalize that so that we can enrich the ecosystem.

Steve Goetz  5:20  

I'll try to give a specific example because I don't think it's either or it's not, there's a lot of win win here. And I'll jump off of Mark's point, we've been on a journey for many years, finding better and better treatments at the end of care and stages of care. So advanced diseases, patients with severe symptoms, and we've used that can use that as a springboard to learn. So we have data from that population, we typically historically have used that data to make those interventional therapies better. So that's great. It's a good day job. However, when we're in those patients with those measures, we'd learn a lot about other things like how medications impact those patients like disease progression, like comorbidities. And so then we can ask the question what what happens if we take those learnings upstream, and start to use those measures to understand medical management of a patient before they're, at that end stage, the severe symptoms. And so now we're earlier in the disease, and we're thinking about management. There are good examples here, continuous glucose monitoring lives here, I think. But if we start to learn about those measures earlier, and start to think about progression and early symptoms, we can jump forward again, we can start to think about early diagnosis. And now we're getting more patients into a funnel that benefits our day job making devices. But it's also tremendously beneficial for those patients, because their early symptoms are often nonspecific, they're, they're challenging, but they're treatable. And that opens the door, things like neuro protection or disease, progress modification, so we get in before the damage is done and severe disease, we can start to change that trajectory. So that's great. If we can do that, then we think about a step earlier. So what if we get in, not when a patient has a disease progress, but when they have risk factors for disease. And now that's the Holy Grail, that's disease prevention. And that's a big jump, to say, hey, we're going to instrument every 40 year old. So we prevent diseases of aging. That's tough. But if you flip that around and say, Well, we're already in a population, and how do we walk backwards and start to harvest those opportunities, we start to see great opportunities to manage disease to diagnose early, and then ultimately to get in and understand these disease processes that risk factors and start to prevent. And that's, that would be a valuable thing for us, it would be a good thing for patients, we just need to figure it out.

Joe Mullings  7:40  

Well, that's an interesting point. And for all three of you, so forever. The big strategics let's just call it for today. Let's call it Abbott, Medtronic, and j&j. You all been wrestling, like armwrestling for one or two point swings in market share, and all of these different areas. And what I just heard Steve say is, instead of fighting for the same pie, there's potentially a larger pie out there. And what that's what we think about the end, so may as shepherd of the digital portfolio and the thoughts how do you decide where to start?

Mei Jiang  8:19  

Yeah, we have this analogy at Medtronic. Right? Do we have a how do we compete better exploit over existing assets capability to compete better in the red ocean? Right. But at the same time, to Steve's point is not like one or the other is really how we continue explored our capability today, who we are today, and to grow more competitive in today's market, but at the same time, how we explore the blue ocean, in our CEO Jeff Masakazu, the new world for Medtronic, right how we dare to go outside, you know, our comfort zone we are we have been playing in the past 73 years. Right? And the truth is COVID is changing everybody's life or continue to change over life. COVID is has been increasingly pushing healthcare outside the beauty into virtual home community based care. So when when care is increasingly leaving Hospital, in average the world what is Medtronic's vision and ambition, ambition to, you know, follow where the people are and will be how we dare to go beyond the doctors and tools, how we actually expand and to activate our superpower in the hospitals and activate them in everyday life. So that's really my new job to be wrong. But fundamentally, I think it will have both the existing world in the end and the New World, we're building living in harmony under one roof, easily sad and dumb, but I think every company is, is making the effort to do that do this,

Steve Goetz  10:20  

well, I'll jump on there. Because the blue oceans are great. And they're super opportunities there. But the blue oceans can be used to dilute the red oceans, right. And so if we do this, well, in a disease like Parkinson's, where we have great late stage interventions, and we've got some colleagues in the room here helped create those interventions. That's, that's a nice thing. But we compete with others who have great innovations there, if we can get early in those patients and start to create continuity of data and an ecosystem that tracks that patient from early diagnosis through an intervention creates candidacy measures that are objective, that has a pull through into that, that that red ocean. And so we think about it certainly as good standalone opportunities. But we also think about it as continuity of care, and an ecosystem opportunities that make us very competitive and what we do today, and also, you know, prevent disruption by others in the future. So it's, it's not again, many of these are Win win, it's not either, or, if we can find those opportunities where those things overlap, that's a very good place for for big men tech to play.

Joe Mullings  11:25  

So LSI Scott's put on this, this is innovators and creators of new technologies, we know strategics are exceptionally good at a few things and not as good as others these days. And that's the way the world should be, you know, we trade on inequality. That's what the capitalist system does. And right distribution, sales service, iteration on the innovation. But we're in a really interesting time. And as I sat here yesterday, I realized that you mentioned COVID, COVID, took 10 years of time, or maybe 12 years of time and jammed it into 24 months, because we all sat here and watched the med tech and health tech industry accelerate certain technologies, push them forward, telehealth some of the digital plays, the changing centers of care may as you mentioned, and then as soon as COVID died out. It was like it was who we went to the dance with, we left. And there were a large number of tech companies that are probably in this audience, robotics, telehealth certain digital plays that are now not necessarily on the trajectory they were on. But we know we've tasted digital, we know what it tastes like. And we can't imagine a world without it. So what are your opinions? Mark I'll ask you, what's your opinion? What's the responsibility of the large strategics to make sure these innovators stay alive? And as an example, there are 200 robotic companies in r&d right now. 100 of them and soft tissue. Where are those other 98? Gonna go? And how do you make sure as a strategic they stay alive? 

Mark Palmer  13:11  

Yeah, so we're talking about competition earlier, and you talked about the effects of COVID. I think what COVID did, as you said, was open our eyes to the the entirety of the care continuum, and how to engage in ways that we never engaged with that before. And although we may not have the same dance partners that we did in the previous 24 months, that vision or the taste of that hasn't gone away. So where I think the the competition is going is that we aren't competing in that corner at the very end of a disease process anymore. Now, we're trying to think about how to compete in a constructive way across the entire care continuum. Robotics is a piece of that being into being able to intervene earlier, being able to intervene more precisely, with a shorter hospital state, that that has its place in that continuum. But I think the big picture, that long view that Mei was describing earlier, is competing across the entire care continuum, and competing constructively across the entire care continuum.

Joe Mullings  14:21  

Steve, you are VP tech. So you've got to keep your eyes on we were, I wasn't sure what we were chatting about. We were chatting when we were on the side, then you've got your eyes on certain technologies. And in a lot of times, you can determine like this. So how do you give guidance to the people who are out there who may be the next 24 months may be tough for them?

Steve Goetz  14:42  

Yeah. It's a good question. I'll, I'll I'll start by saying I think it's certainly we and I think others in the kind of strategic space are thinking differently than even five or 10 years ago. So five or 10 years ago, if we wanted a digital ecosystem, Medtronic would have had the idea that we could build that ourselves. Organic in house and we would have got there eventually. But it would have taken us way too long and very slow, right big, big elephants don't dance quickly. I think driven by by by COVID. But also just by the idea of open innovation, that there's too many smart people in too many places. Our view now is that a lot of these things ought to be done by ecosystem. So not a strategic owned, closed, walled garden, but something open where there's room for a lot of sensors, there's room for a lot of algorithms, there's room for a lot of diagnostics, towards that care continuum. And so it's not necessarily a world where, you know, we want to treat Parkinson's diagnosis to end stage except, or more so that we need a an ecosystem that has offerings along that and we want to, you know, obviously benefit from that both in our, our interventions, but also along the way. But that's not necessarily a Medtronic own thing anymore. And so I think that's part of the reason we're here is to send that message and say, Hey, there's there's a lot of room for collaboration for partnership, if we can assemble these puzzle pieces in the right way, create value for, you know, patients in these chronic diseases who really need help. There's so much value to be created that we're happy to share. So I think it's a different model of innovation that we're certainly open to, it's why we're here and sending that message that, you know, for the right puzzle pieces in the right, puzzle, man, there's a lot of a lot of opportunity to collaborate.

Joe Mullings  16:28  

Now, as we were chatting about this session, over the weeks, you use the term that was really interesting, the new gold rush, would you share your thoughts on the new gold rush in regards to metallic Medtronic strategy moving forward?

Mei Jiang  16:39  

Yeah, our CEO, and they'll rax Khan, shortly after he joined the Medtronic, you know, we had a very exciting dialogue and debate. So who will Medtronic be 5 10 50 years from today? Will we continue to evolve into a digital version of who we have been in the past 70 years, or there is a lot more we can do. Right. And we talked about the gold rush. So who made the most money who became rich from gold rush? Not necessarily the hardest working gold miners, but people who sold them picks shovels Bluejeans. So when we started, you know, validating our future over, you know, the new world with some of the hyper scalars or other ecosystem players. Often time, we heard people asking us, Oh, you are Medtronic, there are not many Medtronic, Altair. So what is your role in the future, we're looking for you to do to help us to create, provide some Magitek shovels. So we can go and do this digital gold rush together with you guys. And using your holy grail, clinical, medical, human device intelligence from the hospital, highly regulated environment. But we want to learn, and we want to pay you guys for this medtech Shabbos. If you create those, we want to buy from you. And we want to use that to join in this digital gold rush. So that's really, you know how I brought up that topic in our early discussion.

Joe Mullings  18:25  

You mentioned the word ocean. And, Steve, I'll start with you on this. And I think about ocean and I think about how irresponsibly people throw around the word digital and healthcare. And we all know that in order to convey and teach, you've got to have language. And in order to have language you have to have agreed upon dictionary has the industry agreed upon what the word digital and each of the components mean within it. And it will it allow us to even have a cogent reasonable point, the point conversation these days?

Steve Goetz  18:58  

Yeah, no, certainly industry hasn't agreed on it. I'm not even sure Medtronic has agreed on it. I'm not even sure that the three of us will give you the same answer. But I think there's elements that are very common. And so we think about big part of digital objective measures, how do we measure something that previously wasn't measured? Objectively, and if you look around a lot of disease, just want to disorder states, neurodegeneration is a good example. All the measures are subjective. It's neurologists watching patients do stuff, it's, you know, Timed Up and Go test. They're not great. They're not continuous measures. They're unavailable. We, we don't, they're poor. They're not rich, they're not high resolution. So So objective measures. For us. It's a big part of digital. Another big part of digital is, is providing these kinds of services in different contexts of care. And so what can you do on an app that used to do in a clinic what can you do with a home screen or a wearable that used to be a diagnostic test? So that shifting of have a point of care, the collection of these kinds of data is a second big part. And the third big part is sort of patient centered is the digital often implies something that is patient led, patient directed, where the patient is more engaged in making decisions. So flipping that model of a physician tells you to, I'm engaged, and I'm helping guide that process. So I think we would put those three elements together, you know, objective data, and all that that implies, you know, the artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms that use that data, the shifting of point of care and delivering more things outside of the hospital, and then the changing relationship between the patient and clinician, those are the are the ingredients, everyone would mix the different cake out of those ingredients, I think, but but I think those are probably the ingredients that would bubbled to the top and anytime you're talking about digital,

Joe Mullings  20:47  

So Mark, in that ocean of data and digital, most of us feel rudderless. What are your thoughts in that area?

Mark Palmer  20:55  

So I'll go back to bridge from your earlier question that we have a lot more disciplines and technologies now that have the opportunity to participate in healthcare than we did before. And that both confounds the language issue or the dictionary problem, as well as creates exciting opportunities. And I think, as we try to navigate this ocean, and try to make sure that not only that we have a rudder but that it's in the water and steering the boat. I mean, looking at the one of the biggest changes is the transition out of the hospital. And now we have to bring along a customer, not just the patient into the equation, and although the complexities around language associated with that, but also the complexities around getting them to participate in the ecosystem in a seamless way. So we know that technology is mature when it becomes kind of a seamless part of your everyday life. And that's what we're trying to get to. So how do we take this explosion? I mean, I, when I think about digital, I think about cyber physical, we have to make this transition from sensing. So the physical world into the digital world, we have tremendous explosion in compute what we do with that data, AR VR AI, simulation, photorealistic rendering, like all this stuff, we have all this rich compute now that we never had before. And then we have to get back to actuation. So taking that digital and turning it into something that is impacting the physical world. And as we as we kind of work through all of this, I think this is where we have the exciting opportunity. And all of us have a role to play in making this as seamless as possible. Despite the skills despite the expertise or the backgrounds we might have, but working seamlessly into the healthcare system

Joe Mullings  22:47  

Mei, do you ever do you ever get concerned about standing guard at it's such an early time in digital, and I get a feel that we're in a rush to put a flag in the ground, and then start working around that flag. And then when you do that you miss the balance of the focus of the horizon. But when we're trying to rush to monetize the digital side, so do you stand guard at that? And how do you Marshal near term and long term on those decisions? Because we all know, Steve said it's hard to get the elephant out of say elephants to dance, not just Medtronic but the billion dollar strategics. Once they sit on a flag, they point all their assets at that for the most part. And there's others walked in the hallway going well, what about this, this could be more important five years from now? How are you going to manage that?

Mei Jiang  23:37  

I don't think we are early you as a matter of fact, I think in general healthcare industry, medtech pharma are behind embracing digital then the other industries I came from high tech. Right. And everybody knows the famous you know, quote from Marc Andreessen back into solving lovern, Software is eating the world. And back in 2016 or 17, Jensen won the CEO at Nvidia said famously now, AI is eating software Well, Software is eating the world. And if you will look around if there is one, you know, and I think AI and the software emerging technologies usually include broadly transforming all industries, virtually all industries but if there is a one industry that is really giving digital song indigestion that's that's us and he returned I think digital is now giving us some indigestion but it's not too late. All right, I think that this is you know, time is now this is perfect timing for us to really sink harder. How we actually there to you know, embrace at full speed, the power of digital the power of ecosystem based digital transformation, because we have been doing the best in, you know, hardware medical device world. Now it's time to learn, you know, new skills, expand the all of our capabilities. And we cannot do it alone. But I know timing is, is perfect, but we need to do this, you know, with, you know how we can tap into and fully leverage and integrate extended the capability from beyond the medtech industry. So that's really our new job to beat on for many of the digital leaders at Medtronic.

Joe Mullings  25:40  

On that point on the advancement outside of med tech, hardware, software, firmware AI is, is is got us and Mark and Steve, especially as you build your teams, Matt, now more than ever, my guess is You've each been in the industry for 20 30 years, you look much younger, by the way, but 20 30 years, how you recruit today. And the people you're looking at bringing on board. We all remember if you didn't work in med tech up till about 10 years ago, you never got into med tech, right? You were never able to get past that gate, no med tech on the resume. And now the healthy organizations are on point looking for people who bring these skills. And so Mark starting with you. And Steve, I want your insight on this. What does it look like as you look at talent now, so it's not any ideological thought process.

Mark Palmer  26:32  

So there's a couple of points there. So one of them is many of us in this room, who have gray hair or no hair, like me, are digital immigrants. We we've watched technology come online, we watch digital come online from analog. And the people that we're recruiting are the people that we want to collaborate with our digital native. And that's a different mindset, that's a different foundation than our generation has. And being able to leverage that and take advantage of that, as we develop products for today and for tomorrow. That's that's a key. That's a key skill. We mentioned language before. Increasingly, none of us can do this alone. And I have my my area of expertise, Steve has his, Mei has hers, the people I'm hiring on my team, I'm gonna hire a diverse team with many areas of expertise. And you mentioned language before, if we cannot communicate our area of expertise to each other, or to the clinician, or to the patient or the customer. It's not worth anything. So that is a key a key element of how we recruit our team, you have to be excellent in where you are, but you have to be able to communicate across to the people outside your expertise.

Steve Goetz  27:54  

Yeah, I'll add on a couple of points that communication is key both for collaboration, but also for recruiting, you know, we found that if we go head to head with, you know, Silicon Valley to try to recruit great data scientists, it's tough. But if we communicate what we're up to, and the vision and the opportunity, the passion to treat patients, it gets a lot easier, and it becomes not a you know, how much you know, what's the California salary versus the Minnesota salary, which aren't the same, by the way. But it becomes about what what do you want to do with your life? You know, do you want to recognize cats on Facebook? Or do you want to, you know, help patients, and that becomes a very powerful recruiting tool. The other thing we found is that we don't have to do everything, and we can partner effectively. But it does require the right kind of communication skills and the right skill sets. And you think about machine learning as a way to answer questions from data. That's true. the really hard part, though, is asking the right questions. And we found that when you partner, a neuroscientist with an analytics team, whether that analytics team is inside Medtronic or outside, we can be very productive. And so we're increasingly finding people who can ask the right questions who are conversant in the tools and technologies, but our deep domain specialists. And that's a great bridge. And then it allows us to partner in a much more, much more open way with with different kinds of partners who may not be traditional medtech players, but who have that that analytic skill. If we can bring the questions to them, we can answer them, we can all make progress together. So it is a different, it's a different way of thinking about skills, you know, again, 10 years ago, we tried to hire someone and put them in the ecosystem and, you know, grow them for 30 years. And until they're an expert, medtech developer, that's not the model anymore. We need. We need people to ask questions, we need to find the right partners to answer them and then we all that ecosystem can be healthy.

Joe Mullings  29:42  

As leaders and managers, that's got to be fun for you because obviously you both are incredibly, you know, intelligent players on this. And in the past, you've probably had a managing lead more of an AI type organization now it's moved to a T type organization across that, that bandwidth. So how's satisfying is that for you guys,

Mark Palmer  30:02  

tremendously exciting, especially for some of us who have short attention spans, being able to work across that matrix of technologies across the natures of applications in healthcare, across the care continuum, are we focused on the patient in this application that we focused on the clinician and this application, I mean, it's, it's so exciting, there's so much to do. It's a target rich environment.

Steve Goetz  30:27  

And it's, it's a great pattern matching opportunity. We've done some really interesting work in our in our brain data space. So where we try to record signals from brain that we think correlate with symptoms of Parkinson's, use those to understand the dosing of stimulation under variables like medication, so that that sort of, you know, sensor, disrupter of medication and, and therapeutic stimulation, that pattern is actually exactly the same pattern that we see in diabetes, where you're using continuous glucose monitoring, across meals, that disrupter is nutrition to dose insulin. And so we've been able to sort of notice those patterns and time time series data, and then apply our our learnings or insights from our diabetes team back to Brain and vice versa. And it becomes a very interesting sort of domain agnostic problem, if we can find those patterns of, you know, who's doing time series data on that kind of, you know, measure, disrupter response, a sort of pattern, we can start to fuse these learnings across businesses that don't otherwise look like they'd match. And so those, you know, Mark said it well, it's a super fun problem, a super fun time. And it's driving these kinds of non traditional collaborations because of that underlying analytics pattern. That's, that's super, super interesting.

Mei Jiang  31:49  

The same with me, I joined Medtronic about 10 months ago, and I was telling everybody, every day when I woke up in that past, you know, 10 months, or even today, I feel like I'm a happy kid in a candy store. So still so much to learn. This is a great company with the great assets we have built in the past years. And not only we have actually been producing the life saving products in the past decades, but we are actually leading the way to decode the most complex, most of the ones the system in the in the whole world is not iOS, Android, is human body.

Joe Mullings  32:31  

We're talking about digital. And we can look across many, many models when we talk about digital. And digital is supposed to be a democratization of healthcare supposed to be supposed to be. Having said that the infrastructure, the digital infrastructure. I view it and others that I chat with view it as a path of divergence of underrepresented people, economically strained people, rural people, the infrastructure is not there. Tier one hospitals, we know how they're supported. We know where they are. And we know how they're operate. And we know the budgets they have. But does anybody here have a concern? legitimately, personally, and professionally, of course, about this divergence that's about to occur? And how can we help mitigate that as much as possible, it's going to happen, we can't be blind. But what is the responsibility, the corporate responsibility as well as our personal responsibility to manage that divergence that's going to occur?

Mark Palmer  33:38  

And I'd like to add one thing to that another thing to that list, which is the data piece and who has it. And that's an important piece, I think, to the equation as well, because if the data is being accumulated into silos, there's also another haves and have nots piece to consider, that will constrain or limit the, the growth of the digitalization of healthcare. But to to kind of speak to that, to speak to that question. Democratization is key. I mean, one of the things that we've been thinking about inside Medtronic is we, we've done a lot of work on engineering. We've done a lot of work on understanding the pathophysiology of the diseases that we treat. How do we take that and not just the hardware that we built for that, but how do we take that medical intelligence and then bring that out? to democratize that and make it so that more people can play with us, they can accelerate their innovation, the whole health system will benefit from it. So I think that's part of our new understanding of our responsibility as a big tech big med tech company, is how to how to help with that. Democratization dissemination, raising the tide, so it raises all All boats in the field.

Steve Goetz  35:02  

Yeah, it's a it's a fundamentally hard problem. But I'll say one way to not democratize is to require highly skilled, highly trained physicians at every step in the procedure. And whether that's surgery or diagnostic. And a lot of interventional care requires that you need somebody who's fellowship trained or whatever. And so we think a lot about how and where can we use objective measures and data to shift that burden of interpretation from the expert on to the system. And, you know, we don't practice medicine or systems don't practice medicine, but you can, in some cases, augment or inform that process in a way that reduces the burden of expertise and interpretation on the clinician. And anywhere we can do that that fundamentally drives to open access, you can deploy that in more places, capacity gets bigger, you know, it gets easier to do, and that doesn't solve all access problems. But that's one way that technology can at least help drive costs out of systems requirements for expertise requirements for infrastructure. You know, anytime you need a big imaging system and hospital, you're not doing that in rural India. And so anytime you can pull that out and find an alternative way to get that information, or to infer that information from, you know, from, from a model from data from a digital twin, whatever. That's a that's an door opening towards access.

Mei Jiang  36:18  

Yeah. So ever since I joined Medtronic, I learned the six powerful world's words, right. And that's, that's our mission, which has been guiding Medtronic in the past decades, evaluate pain, restore health, extend life. Now with digital, we're bracing new life to our mission, not only we want to extend life, we want to add weight life, not only we want to you know, you know, extend or elevate life in hospitals, we want to actually be part of a, you know, driving force, how we actually improve the quality of life, the quality of care for people, not only just in the hospital will continue, optimize over over business right over contribution in the hospital fall, but how we actually expand and activate our clinical power in everyday world, how we democratize the access to the high quality of care, not only just in large, premium hospitals, but where you are in everyday life, every the world that's all about democratization, that's really the the tuners for Medtronic and the many other companies in the whole world.

Joe Mullings  37:35  

So how are we going to measure that? Because unless we measure something, you can't grade it. So how can we really measure the imbalance that is about to come upon us with this digital transition?

Mei Jiang  37:49  

Today, we touch almost 80 million patients life help people on an annual basis. So one key indicator that we are making tremendous progress in the future is how many peoples more people's life, we will actually touch. And, you know, optimize, in the future. I would imagine that will be not only in 10s of millions, but in billions. If we dare to continue to grow over engagement, make people's life, you know, better in hospitals, but at the same time, when we actually expand it to the everyday world, touch people's life, in every household household in everyday life.

Joe Mullings  38:42  

Well, we're up on our 40 minutes here. I really appreciate it. I do appreciate med tronics having the courage to sit here and chat with me. Not many strategics. Well, thank you. Thank you. And I appreciate Scott's hosting this wonderful event and bringing in Medtronic as a partner. So thanks very much. Let's hear it for our panel please.

Scott Pantel  39:10  

I just want to have one or maybe made can weigh in on this question for you something that irritated me a little bit. We talked about the industry being behind. But I think what our industry is doing matters the most. So I would like to ask me to weigh in on how maybe this could be the start of the conversation, the LSI ecosystem and Medtronics leadership, we start to talk about what we can do together because truly what we do matters most in this world I believe and so let's get caught up as an industry mate with me. Maybe you could if you could.

Mei Jiang  39:45  

Yes, I think for large established corporations. Everyone including Medtronic we we continue to learn how to abandon not invented here mentality because the The future is all about open innovation in the ecosystem context. That's why I'm so honored and excited to be part of LSI Europe Summit. And I will continue to engage with all of you here. Because we cannot do this alone. Nobody can do this alone. We need, you know, partners, whether you are nimble startups or large corporations, we want to talk to you and we want to actually see how we can win big together in the future. Yeah, thank you, Scott.