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Medtronic, a medical equipment company, has continued its focus on making acquisitions to support its minimally invasive and robotic surgery device business. Its goal is to stop growing competition in the cardiac and vascular space.
The company expects its minimally invasive therapies operations to grow by nearly 150 basis points in the 2022 fiscal year and by almost 250 basis points by the 2023 fiscal year with the help of its robotic assisted surgery platform.
After its acquisition of Mazor Robotics in late 2018, which builds spine and brain surgical guidance systems for minimally invasive procedures, Medtronic reported strong revenue increases of 5.5 percent to $692 million in its spine and brain therapy segments in 2019. It attributed those earnings to robotics, including the acquisition of Mazor Robotics.
Medtronic bought out remaining interest in the firm after a 2016 partnership gave it an 11 percent share in Mazor, CNBC reported.
The robotic-assisted guidance systems are being used in most major centers in the US, Ishrak explained. The therapy operations business is expected to reach $10.3 billion by the end of the 2023 fiscal year, up from about $8.5 billion last year.
“The desire for that is pretty high, but most importantly what it does is it makes the procedures consistent and we’re integrating it with other technologies, such as our navigation system and eventually our imaging system,” Ishrak explained in the interview. “There’s a spinal robot, we’re also working on a general surgery robot, there’s a cranial robot and there will be others.”
Experts believe that integrated operating rooms (OR) will be the future, partly through robotic-assisted surgery devices (RASDs), which is expected to drive the $4.5 billion hospital OR products and solutions market toward $7 billion by 2022, a Frost & Sullivan analysis predicted.
Thirty-five percent to forty-five percent of ORs will become integrated by 2022. And after 2030, ORs will shift toward a hub-and-spoke model.
Once ORs make the transition to integrated spaces, nearly $30 billion worth of integrated OR opportunities are predicted to become available to healthcare and non-healthcare companies. The main priority for vendors today is to analyze data and interpret, synchronize, and coordinate this data to achieve the highest OR results, the researchers observed.
Data interoperability is expected to help analyze past and present data to predict future health outcomes and patient wellness index for appropriate use of resources. Currently, nearly 70 to 75 percent of major hospitals have adopted OR management solutions.
“Interoperability and cybersecurity are among the key hurdles to the integrated OR. This creates an opportunity for healthcare tech companies, particularly IT startups. The priority for vendors should be to analyze and protect the data. You have a lot of data in the backend that has never been analyzed. This should be done with an aim to interpret, synchronize, and coordinate data to achieve optimal OR results,” said Bejoy Daniel, senior industry analyst for transformational health at Frost & Sullivan.
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