10th MedDev eMarketing Summit
October 20–21, 2026
Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, San Diego
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Explore the newly updated 2026 MedDev Agenda
Two days of practical ideas, real-world case studies and interactive discussions led by medical device marketing and commercial leaders.
20+ speakers. 12+ hours of networking. Two days designed to give you ideas and strategies you can take back and apply to your own marketing.
Click any speaker photo to view their full biography.
Introduction to MedDev 2026
Welcome to the 10th MedDev eMarketing Summit. We'll kick off the conference with a brief introduction, an overview of the agenda, and what to expect over the next two days of learning and networking.
Icebreaker Bingo!
Break the ice and connect with fellow attendees through a fun networking activity designed to encourage new conversations and help you meet industry peers from across the medical device sector.
Chairperson's Opening Remarks
Our chairperson will officially open the summit, introduce the day's program and provide an overview of the key topics, themes and discussions that will shape the conference.
From Traffic to Trust: What GEO/AEO Means for Healthcare Content
Neil Patel
Co-Founder, NP Digital
Session Overview
AI-powered search is fundamentally changing how patients, HCPs and customers discover healthcare information. As traditional search gives way to AI-generated answers, visibility is no longer simply about ranking highly or driving website traffic. It is increasingly about becoming a trusted source that AI platforms understand, reference and recommend. Neil will explore how Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) are changing content strategy and what healthcare marketers can do now to build authority, credibility and visibility in an AI-powered search environment.
Key Takeaways
- Beyond Traditional SEO: Understand how GEO and AEO are changing the way healthcare content is discovered as users increasingly turn to AI-powered search and conversational platforms.
- Become a Trusted Source: Learn what makes content structured, credible and authoritative enough for AI systems to understand, reference and recommend.
- Prepare for Zero-Click Discovery: Explore how marketers should rethink content strategy and measurement when customers may receive answers without ever visiting your website.
Neil Patel
How the Cognitive Age is Changing Healthcare Beyond AI Recognition
John Nosta
Innovation Theorist, NostaLab
Session Overview
Artificial intelligence may only be the beginning of a much larger transformation in healthcare. John Nosta explores the emergence of the Cognitive Age, where technology moves beyond automation and information retrieval to actively augment how people think, make decisions and engage with healthcare. This forward-looking keynote examines what comes after today's AI revolution and how cognitive technologies could reshape customer experience, innovation and the relationship between healthcare organizations, clinicians and patients.
Key Takeaways
- Beyond AI: Understand why today's AI transformation may represent the beginning of a broader Cognitive Age rather than the destination.
- Rethink Healthcare CX: Explore how cognitive technologies could change the way patients, clinicians and healthcare organizations interact, learn and make decisions.
- Prepare for What Comes Next: Consider how marketing, commercial and innovation leaders can begin adapting their strategies for a healthcare environment increasingly shaped by augmented human intelligence.
John Nosta
Experience as a Medicine: Turning Friction Into Trust, Adoption, and Growth
Richard Schwartz
Healthcare Customer Experience Evangelist, Rx4CX
Session Overview
When strong science is no longer enough to differentiate a healthcare brand, experience becomes part of the value proposition. Richard will explore how friction across awareness, access, treatment, support and follow-through can influence trust, adoption, adherence and ultimately business outcomes. The session challenges healthcare organizations to stop treating customer experience as a secondary layer and instead recognize the experience itself as an important part of the intervention.
Key Takeaways
- Identify Experience Friction: Recognize the moments across patient, clinician and customer journeys where unnecessary complexity can undermine trust, adoption and follow-through.
- Compete on Experience: Understand why customer experience becomes an increasingly important differentiator when products, science and information alone are no longer enough.
- Connect CX to Outcomes: Explore how reducing friction and designing more helpful experiences can support stronger human outcomes, customer confidence and commercial growth.
Richard Schwartz
Networking Break
Refresh, recharge and network with fellow attendees, speakers and sponsors over coffee and refreshments in the exhibit area
The AI-Powered Future Patient Is Here
John Duffield
Patient Survivor & Health Futurist
Session Overview
The AI-powered patient is not a future concept. Patients are already using artificial intelligence to understand diagnoses, prepare questions, evaluate treatment information and navigate increasingly complex healthcare journeys. Drawing on his own experience as a patient and survivor, John offers a powerful view of healthcare from the other side of the system and challenges the industry to understand how AI is changing patient expectations, behaviors and decision-making.
Key Takeaways
- Meet the AI-Powered Patient: Understand how patients are already using AI to interpret health information, prepare for clinical conversations and take a more active role in their care.
- See Healthcare Through the Patient Lens: Explore how fragmented information and difficult healthcare journeys look from the perspective of someone actually navigating the system.
- Design for New Expectations: Consider how healthcare organizations must evolve communication, education and customer experience as increasingly informed and AI-enabled patients demand greater clarity, relevance and control.
John Duffield
Get More Out of Claude: A Hands-On Workshop to Get Started
Viviktha Ramesh
Commercial AI Enablement Lead, ASP Health
Anusha Vishwanathan
Product Management Lead | ex-Medtronic, Abbott Vascular, and Aerin Medical
Session Overview
This hands-on workshop will help you get more out of Claude and start putting AI to practical use in your day-to-day work. From understanding how LLMs work and navigating privacy considerations to better prompting, scheduled tasks, skills, connectors, and agents, Viviktha will walk through practical ways to start using Claude more effectively.
Key Takeaways
- How LLMs work and the privacy restrictions and considerations around them.
- Good prompting practices for getting better results from Claude.
- How to set up scheduled tasks, skills, and connectors.
- What agents are and how they differ from skills.
- Q&A and practical guidance for getting started.
Viviktha Ramesh
Anusha Vishwanathan
Lunch
Enjoy a catered lunch and take the opportunity to continue discussions and build new professional connections.
Launching and Scaling an OTC Medical Device
Justin Gardner
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, BLDG Active
Session Overview
Learn how to launch and scale an OTC medical device.
Key Takeaways
- Launching and scaling an OTC medical device
- Understanding customer demographics and psychographics
- Media buying and attribution
Justin Gardner
Category Creation: When Marketing Becomes Market Making (Case Studies from Women’s Health MedTech)
Ikram Guerd
Chief Marketing Officer, Aspivix
Session Overview
In women’s health, some of the most transformative MedTech innovations aren’t entering established categories, they’re creating new ones.
Through real-world case studies, join this session to explore how strategic marketing can uncover overlooked needs, challenge current standards of care, create demand, and turn innovation into adoption.
Key Takeaways
- Market the problem before the product: Make an overlooked or normalized unmet need visible and relevant.
- Build the category, not just the brand: Use evidence, education, KOLs, patient voices, and storytelling to establish a new value proposition.
- Turn awareness into adoption: Understand how marketing can influence clinicians, patients, health systems, and other stakeholders to change established behaviors.
- Learn from women’s health innovators: Explore practical examples of companies that are challenging established practices and building new MedTech categories.
Ikram Guerd
Networking Break
Refresh, recharge and network with fellow attendees, speakers and sponsors over coffee and refreshments in the exhibit area
Panel Discussion: Modernizing Commercialization: Influencers, Evidence, and AI-Powered Growth
Panelists
Debbie Donovan, Materna Medical
Anusha Vishwanathan, Ex-Medtronic, Abbott Vascular, and Aerin Medical, Inc
Ana Crespo, Marketing Maven
Moderator
Reena Mishra, AngioSafe, Inc.
Session Overview
In today's fast-moving healthcare landscape, MedTech marketers face a dual imperative: building authentic digital connections with clinicians and patients while meeting rigorous regulatory, clinical, and economic standards. Winning in 2026 requires a multi-dimensional strategy, from cultivating trusted HCP and patient advocates to leveraging AI for business transformation and turning clinical evidence into commercial success.
This panel will share practical frameworks for modernizing MedTech commercialization, including how to build trusted influencer partnerships, harness AI to accelerate commercial growth and professional development, and transform clinical evidence into compelling value propositions for physicians, hospital committees, and payers.
Key Takeaways
- Building authentic partnerships with HCP and patient influencers to increase trust, reach, and procedure adoption while remaining compliant.
- Using AI to transform commercial operations, accelerate business growth, and future-proof careers.
- Turning clinical and health economic evidence into targeted messaging for CMS, hospital value analysis committees (VACs), and clinicians.
- Aligning marketing, sales, regulatory, and quality teams to execute agile, compliant commercialization strategies.
Debbie Donovan
Ana Crespo
Anusha Vishwanathan
Reena Mishra
Your Patients Are Screaming. Your Marketing Is Whispering
Sarah Uran
CEO, Trusscare
Session Overview
Patients describe their crisis in plain, raw language. Marketing translates that language into something polished enough to pitch, and something gets lost every single time. This session puts real, anonymized user language next to the industry marketing written to represent it. The distance between the two is the whole talk. If your product is built on empathy, this is the audit nobody runs.
Sarah Uran
Day One Closing Remarks
We'll wrap up Day One by reflecting on the key themes and insights from today's sessions, highlighting what's ahead on Day Two, and inviting everyone to continue the conversation at the Cocktail Reception.
Networking Drinks Reception
Join us for an evening of networking over drinks and light refreshments. Connect with fellow attendees, speakers, sponsors, and industry leaders, continue the conversations sparked throughout the day, exchange ideas, and build valuable new relationships in a relaxed and informal setting.
Day Two Opening Remarks
Welcome back to Day Two of the 10th MedDev eMarketing Summit. Join the Chairperson as they recap the key insights from Day One, introduce today's agenda, and set the stage for another day of practical strategies, fresh ideas, and valuable discussions.
Implementing New Technology and Maximizing Impact – An Executive Perspective
Michael Krachon
CEO, Theragenics
Session Overview
Successfully adopting new technologies requires more than selecting the right tools. This session explores practical strategies for evaluating emerging technologies, including AI, driving organizational adoption, and measuring their impact to deliver meaningful business value.
Key Takeaways
- Best practices for assessing and evaluating new technologies, including AI, within an established organization.
- Strategies for maximizing technology adoption while improving internal processes and operational efficiency.
- How to measure technology impact, demonstrate business value, and exceed organizational expectations.
Michael Krachon
Trust Is the New KPI: Measuring What Actually Builds Confidence in Medical Device Brands
Alissa Tambone
Founder & CEO, Swell Market Research
Session Overview
Discover how digital tools such as social listening, AI-driven insights, and advanced analytics are transforming the MedTech marketing research landscape. Learn how these technologies can help uncover deeper customer insights, improve decision-making, and deliver more precise, actionable strategies.
Key Takeaways
- How social listening can uncover emerging trends and customer sentiment.
- Ways AI-driven insights and advanced analytics improve marketing research and decision-making.
- How to translate digital intelligence into more precise, actionable marketing strategies.
Alissa Tambone
Beyond Attribution: Incrementality and Marketing Mix Modeling for Medical Device Marketing
Joe Ferry
Global Director, Digital Marketing, SprintRay, Inc
Session Overview
Attribution alone can leave significant gaps in understanding marketing’s true business impact. This session explores how incrementality testing and marketing mix modeling can complement attribution, overcome measurement blind spots, and give MedTech marketers greater confidence in what is actually driving demand and sales.
Key Takeaways
- Identify the gaps in attribution: Understand how HCP behavior, fragmented data, and proliferating marketing technologies can obscure marketing performance.
- Measure what actually drives growth: Explore how incrementality testing and marketing mix modeling reveal the additional demand and sales generated by marketing.
- Make better investment decisions: Build a practical approach for combining measurement methods to guide budget allocation and strengthen confidence in marketing ROI.
Joe Ferry
Networking Break
Refresh, recharge and network with fellow attendees, speakers and sponsors over coffee and refreshments in the exhibit area
Panel Discussion: What’s Next? The Future of Medical Device Marketing
Panelists
Jennifer Burnham, Abbott
Angela Esposito, Chronic Consultancy LLC
Neil Keene, Ionis Pharmaceuticals
Moderator
Michael Krachon, CEO, Theragenics
Session Overview
This panel brings together industry leaders to explore the trends, technologies, and strategies shaping the future of medical device marketing. From AI and omnichannel engagement to evolving customer expectations and commercialization models, discover what's next for MedTech marketers.
Michael Krachon
Neil Keene
Jennifer Burnham
Angela Esposito
The Surgeon Decides Before the Rep Walks In: Winning in Medical Device Marketing in the Digital Era
Rachid Ouidja
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Providence Medical Technology
Session Overview
Today’s surgeons are researching devices, evaluating clinical evidence, comparing solutions, and forming opinions long before a sales conversation begins. In this session, Rachid will explore how medical device marketers can influence that critical pre-rep journey, build credibility through digital channels, and ensure their brand is already part of the consideration set when the rep walks through the door.
Key Takeaways
- Understand the new surgeon journey: Explore where digital touchpoints influence decisions before direct sales engagement.
- Build credibility before the conversation: Learn how content, clinical evidence, peer influence, search, and digital education can shape preference.
- Connect marketing with sales: Turn pre-rep digital engagement into stronger sales conversations, adoption, and commercial growth.
Rachid Ouidja
The Smartest Company Wins
Garima Mehta
VP Marketing, SleepRes
Session Overview
AI is changing the rules of competition. The companies that succeed won't simply adopt AI—they'll use it to build smarter organizations that learn, adapt and move faster.
Key Takeaways
- Why AI alone is not a competitive advantage—and what is.
- How leading companies are building organizational intelligence, not just deploying AI tools.
- Why AI adoption often fails, even after successful enterprise rollouts.
- The role of specialized AI assistants across regulatory, sales, marketing, finance and clinical teams.
- How marketing leaders can help shape the future of intelligent organizations.
Garima Mehta
Lunch
Enjoy a catered lunch and take the opportunity to continue discussions and build new professional connections.
Evidence Merchandising: The 3-Part Playbook for Securing Reimbursement and Accelerating MedTech Adoption
Debbie Donovan
Head of Commercial Operations, Materna Medical
Session Overview
Discover how to transform clinical and health economic data into a powerful commercial engine by designing, acquiring, and packaging the evidence needed to gain regulatory approval, secure reimbursement, and drive physician adoption. Learn practical strategies for creating evidence that resonates with the FDA, CMS, private payers, hospital committees, and clinicians.
Key Takeaways
- Start with the End in Mind: Map payer reimbursement and clinical utility requirements into early trial designs—or leverage agile protocol revisions—to avoid costly commercial delays.
- Agile Data Acquisition: Discover cost-effective strategies for rapidly capturing missing health economic and real-world evidence without exceeding your clinical trial budget.
- Smarter Literature & Citation Strategy: Learn AI-assisted approaches for curating a robust academic bibliography that strengthens scientific publications and reinforces clinical credibility.
- Full-Spectrum Evidence Merchandising: Master the art of transforming a single core dataset into tailored, high-impact narratives for Hospital Value Analysis Committees (VACs), Medicare, private payers, and key opinion leaders.
Debbie Donovan
Omnichannel Marketing: Managing Chaos & Complexity
Neil Keene
Director, Omnichannel Marketing, Ionis Pharmaceuticals
Session Overview
As AI becomes increasingly embedded in commercial operations and customer engagement, successful implementation requires more than simply adopting new tools. This session explores a practical framework for approaching AI integration, including how organizations can navigate common implementation challenges and build a stronger foundation for effective adoption.
Key Takeaways
- An overview of the framework.
- Common issues with implementation.
Neil Keene
Networking Break
Refresh, recharge and network with fellow attendees, speakers and sponsors over coffee and refreshments in the exhibit area
The Google Maps Goldmine: Why SEO is Your Biggest Asset in the Age of AI
Meg Biediger
Founder & CEO, Midas Local SEO
Session Overview
As patients increasingly turn to Google Maps and AI assistants to decide where to get treatment, the last mile of medical device marketing is moving to local listings that manufacturers rarely control. Using the Greenbrook and NeuroStar pilot as a case study, this session shows how device companies and their agencies can turn local search visibility into a measurable, compliant growth channel.
Key Takeaways
- Why local SEO produces more qualified leads than any paid ad campaign.
- Where national campaigns lose patients at the last mile, and how Maps ranking really works, including the behavioral signals and geo-grid visibility most agencies overlook.
- Lessons from a 10-location pilot with Greenbrook Mental Wellness Centers and NeuroStar, including how co-op funding and co-branded tools can scale local visibility across a provider network.
- Action Plan: A simple checklist for auditing how your providers or locations appear on Google Maps today, and where to start.
Meg Biediger
Building the Commercialization Engine After FDA Clearance: A Playbook for the AI-Augmented Brand Manager
Louise Curcio
Senior Director of Marketing, Lumos Diagnostics
Session Overview
FDA clearance is the beginning of commercialization. In this session, you’ll discover how AI is helping brand managers build stronger commercialization engines by improving market insight, sharpening positioning, and accelerating launch execution. Drawing on a real-world case study from Lumos Diagnostics, you’ll see practical examples of AI in action at different stages of the commercialization journey.
Key Takeaways
- The three capabilities every AI-augmented brand manager should develop.
- A practical framework for building a commercialization engine after FDA clearance.
- AI workflows you can apply directly to your next launch.
Louise Curcio
Day Two Closing Remarks
Thank you for joining us at the 10th MedDev eMarketing Summit. As we conclude this year's conference, we hope you leave with fresh ideas, valuable new connections, and practical strategies to help drive your organization forward. We look forward to welcoming you back next year.
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