UPDATE:In response to St. Jude Medical’s request for retraction, the editor-in-chief of the Heart Rhythm Journal said that he has offered the chance for St. Jude to write a letter to the editor but is not going to retract the article.“I’ve talked with the leadership of the Heart Rhythm Society, I’ve talked with the study [...]

Two-decade market veteran Bret Jensen believes that it’s important to look for stocks with “solid dividends, low valuations and good growth prospects”– and Medtronic is his latest selection.Medtronic’s growth rate has been 9.2 percent over the past five years, though it has recently slowed due to fewer medical procedures and a sluggish economy. However, Medtronic [...]

Nonin Medical has launched the Onyx Vantage 9590 professional finger pulse oximeter at the European Respiratory Society 2011 Annual Conference in the Netherlands.An upgrade from the Onyx II 9550 (and Onyx 9500), the product can measure the pulse, even in the presence of low perfusion. The product can be used for situations that need fast [...]

Serial entrepreneur Abir Sen wants to revolutionize how employers buy health insurance for their workers as well as provide more control and choice to employees in how they choose health benefits.Sen is the founder and CEO of Minneapolis, Minnesota startup Bloom Health. The startup announced last week that it has signed up Blue Cross Blue [...]

Omar Ishrak will begin his era at Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT) by trying to boost the company’s sagging stock price, initiating a program to buyback some 75 million shares of MDT stock and increasing the cash dividend the company pays to shareholders by 8 percent.Medtronic has seen its share price drop by 11 percent since hitting [...]

In May 2010, Minnesota became one of the first states in the nation to design and implement an oversight program for the exchange of electronic clinical health record information between healthcare providers, facilities and other entities like pharmacies and labs.Back in January, when the Minnesota Department of Health provided a report to the state legislature [...]

Venture capitalists sure do look good in suits. Ask anyone who attended the IBF MedTech Investing Conference at the swanky Graves Hotel in downtown Minneapolis last week.But external beauty aside, do they bring any real value — read money — to early stage medical technology firms?In one conference session last week, a venture capitalist made [...]

Here’s another report of how medical device and diagnostic companies are favoring the European regulatory regime over the one created by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – especially when it comes to the510(k) review.Northwestern University researchers did an online survey of 350 medical technology professionals between December and February. They found two-thirds of small [...]

If you have been laid off from the marketing department of any medical device firm and believe that you will land another job in the same field, be it full time or part-time contract work, perhaps you also believed in the May 21 rapture.Get a clue and find a way to retool.That’s the primary advice [...]

That companies involved in health IT have benefited tremendously from the focus on electronic medical records and the desire to create an open, efficient healthcare system is no where more evident than at Ability Network.The Minneapolis health network bills itself as the largest web-based health network used by more than half the hospitals in the [...]