A little over a year ago, Medtronic brought in a complete outsider to reinvigorate a company whose biggest divisions were slowing down.
Omar Ishrak is known for having engineered a small miracle at GE when Jack Welch installed him to run the ultrasound division in the company. Ishrak transformed the business — a business that in Welch’s words had some “false starts” — into a billion-dollar operation thereby catapulting himself into the topmost ranks of the company. And the world, including Medtronic’s board of directors, noticed.
On July 11, an executive who follows Ishrak tweeted the following:
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Today, Ishrak responded to Altraif’s tweet like this:
It might take a while to bring about such a major turnaround at the world’s largest medical device company. Yet, Ishrak can take heart in the fact that, at least from a vision perspective, Medtronic appears to be headed the right way.
