Bob Roda (President and CEO, HemoSonics)

Can you explain your job to a five-year-old? 

I work and lead a company that makes a technology that uses sound to look inside your blood and see what's going on when you're having surgery. We do this really simply by taking a little sample of your blood—a tiny amount. We put it in a tube, we run it through the machine, and the machine basically tells the physician what's going on at that time as it relates to whether a patient is bleeding during surgery.

What excites you most about your job?

I think for me, it's the opportunity that we have at HemoSonics every day to make a difference in patients lives. I believe that we have the ultimate responsibility to help our clinician partners to really deliver the best care possible, because at the end of every test that we provide, it’s someone's mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, or uncle. And for me, that is what has inspired me from the very beginning when I got into the medical field from an industry perspective.

Which trend will change the future of medicine? 

When I think about the transformative things that are going on in healthcare that could have a profound impact, I think this concept of utilizing big data in healthcare decision-making is one that's incredibly intriguing to me. 

When you look at the art and the science of medicine over the years, it's been premised a lot on a do one, teach one mentality. Now, you look at the preponderance of available data—but which hasn’t been leverageable or usable—I think that there are so many potential insights within the data that are not probably obvious to the human eye immediately. But I really do believe that the combination of looking at large datasets and finding trends or nuances that perhaps would have gone unnoticed in the past has the potential to really transform our decision-making in terms of serving our patients.

Looking back, which trends have you missed or underestimated? 

As leaders, when we do some introspection, there are a number of moments that we think back and wonder, ‘How did we not know this? How did we not anticipate this happening?’ In the most recent past, I think the downstream impact of the COVID pandemic is one that no one could have anticipated all of the tentacles or areas that it touched, from supply chain issues to people not being able to access timely care.

We see it in our industry, and in the area that we participate in, the impact on the blood supply and the criticality of that and how precious that resource is. And how contingent it is upon people being able to literally walk into a donor center, roll up their sleeve, and deliver. And then I think from a go forward perspective, those learnings have pointed out vulnerabilities that we all have in this space of healthcare that we probably were naive or maybe even unwilling to address in the past that we now have to tackle every day. Because we understand, what we thought once was impossible to happen has happened. 

And then I think the last part I would say is, building on that COVID perspective, trying to think what the long term implications are for patients, for the healthcare industry, for our practitioners. Of what is the sequelae or the, the implication of all of that and the future not just on patients, but on the workforce. It's clear we're in a different world. I don't know if it's sustainable the way it is. And so, I think it's going to force us to think differently and provocatively about how we approach every element of healthcare. And again, sometimes the things that we once thought were least impacted may become the most impacted and we're going to have to try to get ahead of that moving forward.

Which MedTech initiative or startup deserves more attention? 

For us at HemoSonics, there's a great marriage that deserves more attention, which is this combination of where technology and practice come together. And what I mean by that is that we have this great technology that can do all sorts of tremendous innovative things as it relates to healthcare decision-making, specifically as it relates to, in our world, acute bleeding management. But there's this very pragmatic practice piece that is about habits and changing habits moving forward. So I think it's a little bit where art and science have to come together.

So science being the technology in our case, that's Quantra, and the art being how people treat bleeding management, the practice side of it. And I actually think that the combination of the two in an evolving, forward-thinking way is really where we're going to make the biggest gains in terms of improving patient care and improving our ability to do the best we can for the patients we serve.

I think we've been conditioned to think that innovation always has to be about technology. 

And innovation can be about how we do what we do. And, one of the areas that we partner pretty significantly in is this concept of patient blood management, which is treating blood as a precious resource and making sure that the patient is getting the right blood product at the right time for the right issue. And how technology enables that decision-making, which is what Quantra really does in the marketplace and clinically. 

We have to help educate, inform, and demonstrate the value of, in some cases, simply changing our habits that are aided or informed by technology such as Quantra in order to ultimately drive better clinical decision-making and therefore conclude in better clinical outcomes for the patients that we serve. 

Where would you put a million dollars? 

The idea of education in terms of continued education and awareness is really a critical component of healthcare. There are so many different disease states that are in dire need of advancement in terms of learning and education, and I think on the patient care side, there are so many areas that people are just unaware that it's not just them, that this is a much bigger clinical challenge that exists.

So many of us, even though we're in the industry, we're still healthcare consumers, right? We're blissfully unaware. And at times we are just myopic that this is just a situation with me when, in fact, it may be impacting tens of thousands or millions of people. So I think that combination of education and continued learning and exploration combined with raising awareness about the most pressing clinical needs. Answering the question of, ‘How do we create more awareness around the areas that we're really focusing on?’ is where I would invest because I think that would generate further interest, further investment, further engagement. 

What's the best advice you've ever received? 

Very early on in my career when I was a sales rep, I was working with a physician and she said something to me that had a profound impact on me when I was 23 years old. And she said to me the following: “Ultimately, we have the same job.” It struck me, and I was like, “I'm a sales rep, right? You're a doctor. How do we have the same job?” And she said the following: my role was to help her deliver better patient care. Her job was to deliver better patient care. So ultimately we both had the same job, which was to deliver better patient care. And I don't think as a young 23-year-old, I fully appreciated what she meant when she said that, but over the course of my career, that has been a driving force for me. No matter what I've taken on and my responsibilities, the foundation has always been about the patient and delivering better patient care. And by doing that, we both are delivering on our promises—some implicit, some explicit—to really make a profound positive impact in human healthcare.

And I think what we do at HemoSonics is absolutely grounded and rooted in that same piece of advice I was given as a young 23-year-old in the medtech space. With everything we do, it is our responsibility as individuals and as a company to help empower our physician partners and clinician partners to deliver patient care. And if we keep that front and center, we will actually have the ability to impact human healthcare, not just today, not just tomorrow, but into the future. And that is one of our guiding principles here at HemoSonics.