HealthCare IT Today

The annual AdvaMed MedTech Conference brings medical device makers, entrepreneurs, strategic, and investors together. For the first time, the 2024 conference was held outside of the US in Toronto, ON.  

Key Takeaways

Innovation in medical devices is alive and well. The exhibit hall was full of companies showing off their latest medical products and digital solutions. The breadth of devices was impressive – everything from a patient transport system from Able Innovations to a new type of low-frequency ultrasound treatment.  One topic of discussion was the upcoming changes to medical device regulations in the EU and potentially in the US.

Surprisingly there was not a lot of discussion about cybersecurity or sessions on that topic. This might be because this is already something that is table stakes in the medtech industry or perhaps it was discussed at length at prior conferences.

Able Innovations

One of the most impressive devices on display was Able Innovations’ ALTA platform for patient transfers. The platform is incorporated into a stretcher and it “crawls” underneath a prone patient, lifts them up, and slides them gently from the bed to the stretcher. This is all accomplished with the touch of a button.

This represents a significant improvement over manually shifting a patient – which not only is physically demanding, it also frequently requires more than two staff members. With the ALTA platform, a patient can be transferred by a single staff member.

[Note: Able Innovations is a company that is part of the ventureLAB innovation hub. The author of this article is an advisor at ventureLAB]

Philips

An equally impressive innovation – albeit one with a much smaller footprint – was the Philips patient avatar. Shaped like a gingerbread man, this avatar shows patient vitals like heart rate and respiration. As these rise or fall, the icon changes colors to make it easy for clinicians and caregivers to see if something is wrong.

The avatar was the idea of two anesthesiologists who were also pilots. In a cockpit, there are too many dials and displays for a pilot to monitor at once. Modern cockpits have alert systems and visualizations to make it easy for pilots to be aware of everything that is happening to the plane – without the need to scan all the individual displays.

This was the inspiration for the patient avatar.

A Great Learning Experience

The MedTech Conference was very educational and a great learning experience. It was especially exciting to see several digital health companies in attendance at the event – proving that the lines between medical devices and health IT are blurring.