Omar Ishrak
Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. I think that’s a fair question, Mike. Just to give a little background, what I’d said is that our long term strategy as we build the business out both organically and inorganically is to do – progress along two definitive directions. The first is to build out comprehensively the three big clinical areas that we’ve identified as our focus areas; Cardiovascular, Diabetes, and Restorative therapies. The second was to expand along the continuous care in each of these areas. And so, you’ll see us moving in those concurrent directions as we go forward. Now, in response to the specific question, in diabetes for example, today we’re a niche player so to speak in Type 1 Diabetes and patients who require insulin. We see that we’ve got a platform which enables us to step into a broader range of diabetes patients who largely are of type 2. First, through our call center presence which is very significant, which we can broaden to apply to a broader patient group. And the acquisition of Cardiocom actually helps in that endeavor. Second, through our continuous glucose monitoring technology, which we feel, as we improve its technology, we can expand into more and more patient types. And then thirdly, we continue to look at value products in our expansion into emerging markets, which will enable us to come out with lower and lower cost pumps over time, which should again address a broader set of population. I think in these areas we expect to grow organically as well as inorganically and expand our footprint into a broader range of diabetic patients. In terms of restorative therapies, clearly our strength is our approach into that segment through neuroscience and neurology, which has been our core expertise driven by DBS and other neuromodulation products. From there, we take advantage of the fact that in the U.S. at least, most of the neurosurgeons are spinal surgeons as well. And from that, we have gone into spinal implants as you know and have a built a big franchise there. We are looking around that space both in orthopedics potentially, but also in other areas of neuroscience, in ENT, which have overlapped with that broad category. Again, both organically and inorganically we are looking at these areas to try to fill these gaps and we see considerable opportunity in both of those areas. And at the same time we are also looking for patient continuum of care movements in all three of these areas where we can look at patient management, post treatment, and also diagnostics specifically related to the therapy that we are talking about.