Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak discussed the company's success last year and where they're headed for 2018 during a conference call following the release of Medtronic's fourth quarter 2017 financial report yesterday, according to Seeking Alpha.
Here are five key quotes from Mr. Ishrak:
1. Competitive advantage. "We are creating distinct competitive advantages and capitalizing on the long-term trends in healthcare, namely the desire to improve clinical outcomes; the growing demand for expanded access to care; and the optimization of cost and efficiency within healthcare systems."
2. Emerging markets. "Overall, the consistency of our emerging market performance benefits greatly from geographic diversification, reducing dependence on any single market. We continue to believe that the penetration of existing therapies into emerging markets represents the single largest opportunity in medtech over the long term."
3. Volume to value (speaking about the extension of its Hospital Solutions business, which grew in the double-digits last year): "We are aggressively developing other unique, value-based healthcare solutions across each of our groups. And while we are still early in this journey, we remain focused on leading the shift to healthcare payment systems that reward value and improved patient outcomes over volume. As always, we expect to do this in a way that benefits patients, healthcare systems, as well as our shareholders."
4. Cardiac bundled payments. "CMS has introduced some cardiac bundles, and we are in the process of coming up with offerings in those areas. We are actually, we have a lot more experience and clear data that we already have of benefits that we can get by looking at the therapy over an extended period. So we still are supportive, very supportive of CMS' move toward these value-based bundle payments."
5. Universal healthcare (after a question on the China market): "As these markets go to universal coverage, there will be a tendency to kind of homogenize the products. I think that's sort of encouraged us to take our value based healthcare analysis and business models to these emerging markets much more rapidly and in a much more accelerated fashion than we were thinking because the key to getting the differentiated pricing, if you like, is to demonstrate differentiated outcomes, which we think we can. And so that's how this is going to go and play out as well. We will demonstrate additional value with these differentiated products. If there is no value, we shouldn't be getting more price."