Maria Shepherd, president of Medi-Vantage and co-founder of MedExecWomen will moderate a panel on digital health at BioMedDevice Boston next month.

Susan Shepard

August 18, 2022

3 Min Read
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Image courtesy of Nattapon Kongbunmee / Alamy Stock Vector

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In At the Cutting Edge of Digital Health, a keynote panel discussion at BIOMedevice Boston, six women medical device industry executives will team up to talk about innovations in digital health solutions. They’ll talk about new products, as well the regulatory challenges they might encounter, and more. MD+DI spoke with the panel’s moderator, Maria Shepherd, president of Medi-Vantage and co-founder of MedExecWomen, to get her take on why she thinks digital health products have become such an important part of the medical device industry, and what she hopes attendees will take away from this session.

Digital health solutions are now being seen in every area of the medical device industry. “I think there’s a major convergence coming, and that digital health [solutions] and medical devices will just become one,” Shepherd said. “There will be no need to differentiate between the two, and I can't think of a single medical device that can't benefit from having a digital component.”

However, she said, the path to incorporating digital solutions may not be a smooth one. One potential problem she mentioned was the uncertainty surrounding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical devices.

“I think that AI is going to be a challenging area for software as a medical device,” Shepherd said. “I think that it's still not well understood. And the whole process of being able to integrate something that is automatically learning and updating is going to be a challenging concept to regulators and to the clinical community also,” she said.

Members of the panel will discuss this, as well as many other topics in digital health, Shepherd said, and they will all bring their experiences to share with each other and the audience. “I want to be able to pull a nugget or two from each one of these panelists,” she said. “It’s about what they’re learning, about their own experiences with digital health, in their spaces.”

When asked what she hopes attendees of the keynote will learn from it, she said of R&D and engineering personnel, “I want them to walk away from this with ideas on how they can be engineering their products for the future.” She said CEOs and marketing and business development people can benefit as well by going back to their engineering and R&D firms with new ideas.

“We've got five brilliant women on our panel here, and so they’ll get the chance to be able to pick the brains of these women who are leading these medical device companies,” Shepherd said. “That's an opportunity that just doesn't happen all that often.” She added that she welcomes receiving questions ahead of time to submit to the panel.

The panel, with Shepherd moderating, includes Jill Dooling, vice president of Strategic Accounts at Vapotherm, Sara Kehoe, Senior Director, Clinical Insights at Danaher Diagnostics, Teresa Prego, Chief Commercial Officer at Nile, Mira Sahney, President, Pelvic Health at Medtronic, and Jill Schiaparelli, CEO at Avation Medical. The session, sponsored by MedExec Women, will be held Thursday, Sept. 29, from 9:15 to 10:15 a.m. on the Center Stage.

 

 

 

About the Author(s)

Susan Shepard

Susan Shepard is a freelance contributor to MD + DI.

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