MedTech at the Forefront of Transforming Healthcare

As we begin 2022 and face the certainty of yet another year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of healthcare throughout the world is clearer than ever – and, for our MedTech team, so is our mission. We must continue responding to the urgent demands of the global pandemic today while also shaping the next frontier of global healthcare for tomorrow.

The pandemic has given us all a deeper appreciation of healthcare as an investment in human possibility rather than a burdensome expense to bear. It has also shown us how digitization in the healthcare industry can power a quantum leap forward in innovations that address unmet needs, elevate the standard of care, and save lives.

Reimagining Health

We feel the call of answering this global ask every day. Our MedTech team touches the lives of more than 275 million patients each year. Our team’s global footprint will continue to play an essential role in helping healthcare systems in every region deliver the most efficient and effective care – both in Covid patient care and traditional care.

Big challenges have a way of propelling ingenuity forward – and there is no shortage of challenges in healthcare in 2022. Procedure volume constraints. Shortages of nurses, nurse techs, and surgical techs. Supply chain bottlenecks. Patient hesitancy to seek care – to name just a few obstacles that are visible at the onset of the New Year. Yet, with our global infrastructure, vast innovation network, and trusted partnerships throughout the world, our MedTech team is deploying solutions that are not only responsive to these challenges but are ushering in new ways of delivering care and doing business.

As patients have grown more accustomed to telehealth and other ways to cultivate their ideal healthcare experience, the industry must embrace the mindset of consumer preference. With healthcare professionals, we’re helping to create the potential for patients to have outpatient surgeries versus overnight stays, identifying new sites of care, and expanding the range of telehealth options. We’re partnering with industry associations to bring online training and professional education courses to hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals throughout the world. We’re using 3D printing to bring greater agility, adaptability, and resilience to the supply chain that may allow health systems and clinics to close shortages in their supply chain in new ways. And we’re expanding My Health Can't Wait, a global education initiative and online resource, with an enhanced focus this year on Black and brown populations in the United States. My Health Can’t Wait gives patients the information they need to pursue healthcare with confidence and gives healthcare providers tools designed to help them communicate with patients as they support them in prioritizing their health during COVID-19 and beyond.

While we must continually mobilize and adapt to the myriad of pandemic-related challenges as they unfold in real time, we are also accelerating our future-directed innovations in digitization and technology, leaning into the immense promise that robotic and digital surgery hold with the goal of making medical intervention smarter, less invasive, and more personalized. From 3-D models of patients’ organs and live navigation to access hard-to-reach anatomy, to miniaturized devices with smart sensors and robotic surgical solutions, realizing the promise of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the OR depends on our ability to fully integrate separate functions like instrumentation, imaging, and analytics into a smart, sensitive, seamless, interconnected digital surgery ecosystem. We will continue to draw on our cross-sector expertise and our growing innovation pipeline to scale access to these technologies to meet unmet needs and bring greater health equity across the globe.

Personalizing Healthcare

When we talk about personalization in healthcare, we mean innovations that will empower patients to choose treatment that directly reflects their uniqueness as individuals – and the uniqueness of their conditions – rather than what they share with the common denominator. As Johnson & Johnson continues to make materials for an individual patient’s anatomy increasingly available – including specifically molded 3D-printed orthopedics such as implants, grafts, fillers, and casts – the one-size-fits-all approach to surgeries and medical procedures will soon become a thing of the past. Smart sensors will be used for the integration of these materials with the design and development of our other digital surgery innovations, aiming to help clinical settings become more attuned, adaptive, and responsive to individual patients’ needs. Since this growing personalization is being driven by medical innovations with brand names, it will also enable a new form of consumerization and consumer advocacy in surgery.

In partnership with some of the leading technology voices, our MedTech team is leading the way to a new, reimagined way to perform the more advanced, and safer surgeries. We are collaborating with Microsoft to expand our digital surgery ecosystem. Working together, we will be able to more quickly realize our vision of driving innovation to advance skills, improve workflow and enhance surgical decision making. Combined with our innovative surgical ecosystem that includes next-generation robotics, instrumentation, advanced imaging and visualization, data and analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital solutions, this new partnership will ultimately create a better healthcare experience and improve patient and economic outcomes.

We are a science-based company with 135 years of leading innovations in healthcare, and our pioneering spirit has only gotten stronger. We remain driven to build the future of healthcare. As we begin 2022, our optimism for igniting what’s possible in every-body has never burned brighter.