We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a world thick with healthcare conferences, MedtechVision, held September 15-16 at the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, CA, stood out, both for its quality of content and for its participants.

“I hadn’t given any thought to the fact that it was theoretically a ‘women’s conference’ before I walked into the room. I’d just promised the organizer, a friend, that I would come,” said Vance Vanier, CEO of Navigenics. “But walking into the room full of women had quite an impact; I realized how much I stood out and it was worth noting. It made me realize what women experience when they go to events like this.”

Vanier was commenting on his experience as a male attendee at the conference, which was intended to provide a platform for the many women executives in the medical technology field to wield the microphone. Some 200 women and 3 intrepid men spent two days in a room hearing from some of the most influential and experienced provider, corporate, government and investment executives representing medical technology organizations nationwide.  If you are a man and reading this article, don’t run away yet. What was most notable about the conference overall was that it wasn’t for women and about women—rather it was intended to give a platform to executives who just happened to be women and who are rarely given a place at the microphone to talk about general medical technology issues that apply to the entire field. No “bikini medicine” here; this was a conference about health and business in a world where bringing new medical technology to market is getting ever more challenging.

Organized by Covidien, Abbott Vascular, and a number of other organizations with leadership roles in the field of medical technology, the conference gave healthcare executives a chance to come together to learn and problem-solve within this highly stressed and rapidly changing field. The presentations and panels covered emerging regulation and reimbursement issues as well as the challenges of nurturing medical technology companies in a rapidly changing healthcare industry. Not only was it unusual to see a conference like this where all of the experts were women, but it was also unusual to see a medical technology conference where the issues of cost and the need for evidence-based medicine were so closely coupled in the context of innovation.

Presenters and panel members, including executive representation from public and private companies, the FDA, numerous hospital systems, insurance carriers, and private equity firms, were all female, but it was their mountain of experience and knowledge that stood out, not their hairstyles. Keynote speakers included Ginger Graham, former CEO of Amylin Pharmaceuticals and former group chairman, Office of the President, Guidant Corp.; Bray Patrick-Lake, president & CEO of the PFO Research Foundation; and, Ellen Zane, president & CEO of Tufts Medical Center. Zane’s message to the audience was right on point: Providers must reduce needless variations in care, insurers must reform their administrative practices, employers must stop offering the world to employees while complaining about costs, governments must pay adequately for needed care, and consumers must take responsibility for their own behavior when it comes to their health. Without great advances toward these goals, Zane noted, the healthcare system cannot evolve beyond its troubled state.

Particularly interesting were the pairings on panels that juxtaposed people on all sides of key issues. The reimbursement panel, featured medtech executives from Sonitus and Covidien, as well as the chief medical officer of CMS Region IX, Dr. Betsy Thompson, and Robin Cisneros, national director of medtech assessment for the Permanent Federation.  A key takeaway from this panel was the rising tension between payers’ desire to reimburse only for new products that demonstrably improve health outcomes and manufacturers’ desire to … Next Page »

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Updated: Medical products giant Covidien (NYSE:COV) says it wants to play the venture capital game, announcing this morning that it has launched a corporate VC group to make strategic investments in startups focused on medical devices, diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals.

Covidien Ventures, which operates at Covidien’s headquarters in Mansfield, MA, appears to be in sync with the mantra of company executives, who have preached since Covidien spun out of Tyco International in June 2007 that the company would seek expansion in high-margin businesses such as advanced surgical devices. I caught wind back in the May-June timeframe that Dan Sheehan, who heads Covidien Ventures, had been making the rounds at life sciences events in the Hub. I tried to contact Sheehan months ago, but a Covidien spokesman declined my request because Sheehan was transitioning from his home in the Midwest (he was previously a general partner at Affinity Capital Management in Minneapolis) to New England.

It remains unclear how much Sheehan and Covidien Ventures have to invest in life sciences startups (yet given that Covidien generated about $10.2 billion in fiscal 2007 revenue, the VC group’s resources could be vast). The corporate venture group gives some details about its investment criteria at its new website, saying it plans to invest up to $5 million in each round of financing and seek seats on the boards of directors at the startups in which it invests. Covidien Ventures doesn’t currently list a portfolio of existing investments on its website.

In addition to Sheehan, Covidien has recruited Dave Neustaedter for the new venture arm. Neustaedter was a director of commercial strategy and advanced technologies for the Stryker Development division of medical devices powerhouse Stryker (NYSE:SYK), of Kalamazoo, MI. Joseph Graham, the third member of the VC group, was recruited from within Covidien’s corporate R&D unit. Before he joined Covidien, Graham was manager of a DNA sequencing lab at MIT’s Whitehead Institute.

Update Aug. 19: Covidien spokesman Bruce Farmer says that the company has not established an actual fund from which investments would be made, like a traditional VC would, and it has not decided on a set amount of venture investments it plans to make annually. He confirms, though, that the corporate VC group falls in line with the company’s strategy to tap outside sources for new technology. “One of the issues we had as Tyco Healthcare was that R&D was significantly under-funded,” Farmer says, “and this is a way to catch up.” He adds that the firm also pursued this goal through the acquisitions of technology assets from Portland, OR-based CardioDigital this summer and Sorbx, of Jacksonville, FL, last year.

The launch of Covidien Ventures should attract many medtech startups in search of funding to advance their experimental products to the next phase of development, says Tom Sommer, president of MassMEDIC (Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council), a Boston-based industry group. “This is an important offering that the region’s medtech community now has at its disposal,” Sommer says.

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