Your Pick for the Best Medtech CEO

Omar Ishrak handily topped a poll for top medtech CEO.

Qmed Staff

In a Qmed reader survey, Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak garnered 57.02% of 228 total votes. Edwards Lifesciences' Michael Mussallem took second place in the poll, with 16.67% of the vote, while J&J's Alex Gorsky was ranked third, with 10.96% of the vote.

Since Ishrak took over as Medtronic's CEO in June 2011 and the present, the company's stock has nearly doubled--from roughly $38 per share to the $75 range it is trading at now. He has helped elevate the status of Medtronic, already the biggest pure-play device firm, into an industry juggernaut through the nearly $50-billion Covidien acquisition. The merger was the largest that the device industry has ever seen. The new company now has more than 85,000 employees.

"The integration is going very well," Ishrak recently said in a CNBC interview. "It's something that Covidien employees are really rallying around, as well as Medtronic employees," he explained, pointing to positive survey feedback received from the company's employees.

During Ishrak's tenure, the company has made "value-based healthcare" into a guiding principle, beefing up the company's healthcare service offerings.   

The company has also emerged as a leader in the transcatheter aortic valve replacement market, recently announcing the FDA approval for its third-generation percutaneous heart valve--the CoreValve Evolut R, which is repositionable and recapturable.

The company's Micra device--world's smallest pacemaker, recently won the top innovation award for practice improvement at the EHRA Europace-Cardiostim event in Milan.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to our daily e-newsletter.