What’s So Great About the Boston Medtech Ecosystem?

Regional medtech clusters abound in the United States, led by Southern California, Minneapolis, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Boston. Many other new, emerging markets are worth watching due to their steady growth of medtech over the past five years—Boulder, Colo.; Salt Lake City, Utah; Memphis, Tenn.; New Haven/Hartford, Conn.; Sacramento, Calif.; and Phoenix, Ariz. These regions have robust ecosystems supporting blossoming medtech clusters that enable innovation and collaboration to flourish.

Once again, Boston is cited as having the highest aggregate medtech employment at 40,433 employees.¹ Measured differently, Orange County has the highest percentage of medtech employment when compared as a segment of total (non-farm) employment at 1.78% (28,953 employees).² Minneapolis is only a short step behind Boston and Orange County for the second highest employment at 32,074 employees and employment concentration at 1.71%, respectively (Table 1).

What Makes Boston Stand Out?

World-class universities like MIT and Harvard, great medical academic hospitals like Beth-Israel and Tufts, and many medical firsts like the Mass General Hospital Ether Dome, where Dr. William T.G. Morton made history on Oct. 16, 1846, in the surgical amphitheater, now known as the Ether Dome. It was there Dr. Morton demonstrated the first public surgery using ether. Over the next 50 years—from 1821 through 1868—more than 8,000 operations were performed in the Ether Dome.³

In addition, the educational and meeting infrastructure present in Boston contributes to why it stands out—meetings like The MedTech Conference, MEDevice, MedExecWomen, LSX Boston, DIA, the World Medical Innovation Forum, the Women’s Health Innovation Summit, Front End of Innovation (FEI), and many others. The executive teams of these meetings know Boston has the medtech infrastructure to support these meetings. Further, many people travel to Boston to do business with customers and colleagues within the industry and healthcare ecosystem.

Following are several of the events you should have on your calendar to consider attending and a few reasons why.

The U.S. Annual Medical Device Human Factors and Usability Engineering Conference

TT LifeSciences creates meetings for sharing knowledge among professional peers. These events cover current challenges by finding and connecting the right people as speakers and audience. The latest event featured speakers and content that were highly relevant, informative, and pertinent to the challenges of human factors/usability testing and engineering. Members of the audience included seasoned user experience medtech professionals, as well as many new to human factors and usability engineering, eager to meet and learn from their peers.

The MedTech Conference

Although this event does move around to other cities, it recently took place in Boston. My favorite part of AdvaMed’s annual meeting is the CEOs Unplugged Stage, where leaders from the medtech industry discuss a range of topics. Recent session titles included, “Managing Lean, Delivering Big, Staying Ahead of the Innovation Curve”; “Current Investment Flow, M&A and Deal Structures”; “The Future of Leadership in MedTech: Trends of Disruption and Consolidation”; and “At a Tipping Point: Capitalizing on the Digital Health Opportunity.” This is not the first time I’ve mentioned this event (and I suspect it won’t be the last) because the content and the networking are consistently superb.

Boston MEDevice (formerly BIOMEDevice)

MEDevice is part of Informa Markets’ IME event portfolio and has the mission of serving as a “catalyst for tomorrow’s groundbreaking medical devices [that] brings innovation to life by uniting the medtech industry.”4 With a focus on medical device manufacturing, all industry functions can attend MEDevice to be inspired by the technological capabilities that will become part of the future of medtech innovation, which makes the healthcare industry’s life-saving breakthroughs possible.

LSX Boston

The LSX World Congress USA is an investors meeting that brings together leaders from the medtech, biotech, and health tech sectors to network, display innovations, and discuss partnership opportunities. It is a unique platform for CEOs, investors, and industry executives to hold discussions and collaborative sessions to define the future of healthcare technology.

The World Medical Innovation Forum

The World Medical Innovation Forum is a uniquely academic meeting. It brings industry and global leaders together to tackle the most up-to-date opportunities and challenges in significant technology developments, the investment ecosystem, and regulatory barriers. The event provides a platform in which to discuss the combined impact of all of these on the future of patient care through the eyes of clinicians at Mass General Hospital.

The Women’s Health Innovation Summit

“The Growth Engine of Women’s Health: Invest, Innovate, Transform” is the tagline for this event that boasts more than 50 world-class industry speakers and is attended by approximately 750 C-level executives. For anyone who interacts with the women’s health technologies industry, this is a meeting not to be missed. According to Fortune Business Insights, the U.S. women’s health devices market  was valued at $19.9 billion in 2022 and is anticipated to grow at a 9.6% CAGR to $34.5 billion by 2028 (Table 2).⁵

Unlike some of the other meetings referenced in this article, tracks at this event cover commercial growth, femtech, research and innovation, and consumer markets. The women’s health consumer market is very interesting since there is so much crossover into medtech. One of the consumer sessions—Effective Marketing for Femtech & Consumer Products—reviews how to effectively market digital and physical products via social media marketing, e-commerce marketing, and educational marketing.

Front End of Innovation (FEI)

The FEI meeting is industry agnostic, allowing people from the medtech industry to learn from other industry leaders (like Proctor & Gamble). At this event, attendees will gain insights into new theories of innovation to strengthen the value of that innovation to an organization. Organizers state the event provides “…the foundational, evolutionary, and transformational elements you need to drive innovation forward at your organization.”⁶

The Medi-Vantage Perspective

When I first started Medi-Vantage in 2007, there were very few medtech meetings so I endeavored to never miss The MedTech Conference or Boston MEDevice. For better or worse, the event landscape has since changed. Since each of these meetings is differentiated and brings its unique value proposition, I try to attend as many as my schedule permits. Our industry is changing rapidly and we need to maintain our professional development as much as possible. Where else but one of these events might you witness a live pepperectomy? 

References

1. tinyurl.com/mpo240701
2. tinyurl.com/mpo240702
3. tinyurl.com/mpo240703
4. tinyurl.com/mpo240704
5. tinyurl.com/mpo240705
6. tinyurl.com/mpo240706

Maria Shepherd has more than 20 years of experience in marketing in small startups and top-tier companies. She founded Medi-Vantage, which provides marketing and business strategy for the medtech industry. She can be reached at [email protected]. Visit her website at www.medi-vantage.com.