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A friend’s diabetic daughter, though using an insulin pump that closely mimics the natural action of the pancreas, still has to prick her finger and manually record blood sugar readings daily. Then, about every three months, she takes, or faxes, her scribbled list of numbers to her endocrinologist in a remote city to strategize on new methods to keep her blood sugar readings within a desirable range, to avoid later complications. It may be a while before that teenager gets instant feedback on her insulin doses, but modern medicine is making huge strides in letting doctors monitor patients and their needs more closely—even if patients are at home or in the office. Because Medtronic Inc. (www.medtronic.com) has consistently put itself in the forefront of that progress, it has become a fixture on our elite list of New Market Leaders. [For the methodology used to determine leadership, for a list of the top 100 New Market Leaders, and for a list of the 100 companies that have shown the most improvement since the start of the economic downturn, see “The Context 100s,” in the February/March 2002 issue.] Medtronic, the world’s largest maker of implanted medical devices, has made innovation a relentless focus. It generally has five generations of each type of device under development at any one time (the current product, one minor upgrade, one major upgrade, and two new technologies that are expected to produce longer-term improvements). That focus has led to impressive numbers over the past five years—compounded annual growth of 19% in revenue and 23% in earnings. The focus has also set Medtronic up exceptionally well for the future. The company’s devices—defibrillators, pacemakers, and drug-delivery devices, to name a few—are at an inflection point that will move Medtronic beyond being a device company and make it an information company. Pacemakers, for example, have long been able to record the heart rate, the heart’s blood flow, and its internal pressures, as part of providing controlled electric stimulation to the organ. The devices have been able to report those measures to doctors. But that could happen only when the patient visited the doctor’s office. The new frontier for Medtronic is that, through the CareLink platform that recently received FDA approval, doctors can monitor patients remotely. For now, the system is a bit clunky. Patients need to pass a wand over the implanted device to read stored data, then have the reader transmit the information to another device, called a “programmer.” The programmer then forwards the information to the doctor’s office over the Internet. In the future, the pacemakers will be able to automatically report their data to doctors wirelessly. In addition, doctors will someday be able to adjust patients’ pacemakers remotely. The ability to make adjustments easily is important because each patient’s heart responds to stimulation slightly differently and because that response can change as the years go by. Once remote monitoring becomes automatic and is applied to a wide range of medical devices—ones that track blood sugar, blood pressure, and brain activity, for example—the equipment will change the nature of patient care. Doctors will be able to give patients more customized treatments because they’ll know how each body reacts to every circumstance imaginable—whether that’s taking a new medication or running a marathon. Doctors will be able to be notified instantly if a patient is experiencing a heart attack—doctors may, in fact, need time to adjust, because they will be receiving so much more data. With the continuous stream of information its devices will supply, Medtronic will be able to develop better versions. It could also help pharmaceutical companies better understand how diseases progress, helping the companies produce more powerful drugs—and, perhaps, generating fees that could become a new, substantial revenue stream for Medtronic. Patients, meanwhile, will be delighted to know that they can “visit” their doctors while, perhaps, sitting by the pool.
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