Medical Design Briefs - September 2022 - 6

Inside the
OEM:
Baxter
H
ow does a 100-year-old medtech
company evolve yet still
retain its focus on the company's
original mission? Baxter
has gone through many different
phases and transformations. Now it
is looking forward to its next phase.
" If we think about the phases of transformation
of Baxter - how did we get
here - it is worthwhile looking backwards
to think about how we transformed
Baxter to the Baxter of today, " said José
(Joe) E. Almeida, chairman, president,
and chief executive officer, at the company's
shareholder conference in May.
When Almeida joined the company in
2016, Baxter examined the strength of
the financial operations of the company.
" We went after free cash flow, we went after
expenses, we went after cost reductions.
We started to put the foundation in
the most important thing: patient safety
and quality. That became our number
one tenant in the company, " he said.
The New Baxter
To strengthen its financial position, Baxter
invested in operations and innovation.
That phase of the transformation set the
company up for the second phase in 2018-
2021, which was to execute on innovation.
6
José (Joe) E. Almeida, Chairman, President and
Chief Executive Officer, Baxter
To do that, Baxter created an ecosystem
and put in place medical affairs, clinical
trials, and regulatory affairs teams focused
on developing new products.
" The company was very focused on
pharmaceutical [products], but prior to
2016, very few products were launched
on the market, " said Almeida. " Today, we
have a cadence of new products. "
Almeida said the next step was to determine
how to get there. " And that was
when we decided to bring Hillrom into
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Baxter. That acquisition was extremely
important to Baxter. We closed in December
[2021], and it is pushing the
company forward, creating innovation
opportunities to expand the markets that
were in. That created the new Baxter. "
He said the new Baxter welcomed
10,000-12,000 employees from Hillrom to
make the company 60,000 people strong.
But, he said, " our mission is so strong. It is
one of the things that I did not change at
Baxter. I spent a lot of time reflecting on
what the mission of the company should
be. The mission of the company was well
established for many decades, and that
mission is to save and sustain lives. "
With the pivoting of the company into
more connected care and understanding
where the markets were going, though,
Baxter had to restate its vision, he said.
" Our vision now says that we're going to
'transform healthcare with a customer
focus in improving patient outcomes and
enhancing workflow efficiency.' That's
very important because we must create
the future by not only connecting devices
but also by creating intelligence behind
them, enabling cost-effective care. And
cost-effective care is two very specific vectors:
The first one is the ability to provide
effective clinical outcomes; the second is
Medical Design Briefs, September 2022
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Medical Design Briefs - September 2022

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