Henk Westendorp

Organisation: Medtronic
Position: Sr Country Director BeNeLux

Five Trends in MedTech leading to Patient Value

The world has never been more exciting and demanding for MedTech. We can leverage technologies and innovation from other industries but face challenges in care settings because of increasing number of patients and lack of medical staff. Medtronic started as a company by creating the first pacemaker with dr. Lillehei. With a mission focused on improving patient outcome the founder Earl Bakken built a leading Medtech company of 90,000 employees worldwide.  We see five trends which make a positive impact for patients in the future and will influence the way health care professionals work. The first one is miniaturization of devices, the second is robotic assisted surgery, the third one is diagnostics & AI, the fourth one is Patient apps and the fifth one is Population management with new care settings. Examples of each solutions are given with the patient value identified and key aspects for market introduction.

Biography

Henk has a MSc Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Henk has worked in the field of medical devices for over 25 years in R&D, project management, strategy, marketing, business and sales. He worked at Vitatron a pacemaker company in R&D and Project Management for 7 years. He moved to Medtronic in Minneapolis, USA and spent 5 years and was responsible for marketing and product planning in cardiology products. In 2010 he transitioned to Medtronic EMEA HQ in Switzerland to lead the European Marketing Team and subsequently the Cardiac Rhythm and Heart Failure business for Europe and Canada from 2010-2015. He became Vice President sales for the Cardiac and Vascular Group in the ABGIN (Alpine-Benelux-Greece-Israel-Nordics) region in 2016-2020. Henk and his family moved to the Netherlands and since 2020 is Sr Country Director for Medtronic BeNeLux. Henk supports several start-up companies and he enjoys long distance running, skiing and reading.