By MICHAEL MILLENSON
Abbott Ventures chief Evan Norton may have spent part of his youth on a farm, but there’s no manure in his manner when speaking of the medical device and diagnostics market landscape. The key, he says, is to avoid being blindsided by the transformational power of digital data.
“We’ve been competing against Medtronic and J&J, so that has the risk of us being disintermediated by other players that come into the market,” Norton told attendees at MedCity Invest, a meeting focused on health care entrepreneurs. “Physicians are coming to us and asking for access to data for decisions, and they don’t care who the manufacturer [of the device] is. Are we enabling data creation?”
Abbott, said Norton, wrestles with whether they are simply data creators or want to get paid for providing algorithmic guidance on how the data is used. (Full disclosure: I own Abbott shares.) Other panelists agreed making sense of the digital data deluge remains the central business challenge.
