Edwards Lifesciences CEO Mike Mussallem has a unique and long-standing perspective of what the medtech industry should be and do. In over two decades, he has built the structural heart disease and critical care monitoring company into one of the global medtech industry’s most effective innovators.

A typical word cloud for discussions around patient-centered care would feature: business model, digital health, financing, PPP, resources, data sharing, staffing and escalation of costs. But so many other words are missing, which is why patient-centricity risks getting stuck in its current incomplete form. What are medtechs to do?

In this new series titled Getting Personal, we talk to new and veteran senior executives about their journeys to corporate leadership, their motivations, passions, and the peaks and valleys of running a medtech company. Medtech Insight sat down with Mike Mussallem, CEO of Edwards Lifesciences, the leading seller of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) devices, at the company’s Irvine, CA-based headquarters.

New trial data shows Boston Scientific’s Sentinel cerebral embolic protection device may reduce the risk of disabling stroke, but it does not appear to reduce the overall risk of stroke.