Resmed’s Mick Farrell, new AdvaMed chair, outlines strategic priorities for the trade organization.
Key takeaways:
- Mick Farrell will serve a two-year term as chair of AdvaMed beginning in January 2026.
- He is the first chair to come from the home medical equipment sector, highlighting a shift toward “care everywhere.”
- Priorities include patient-first innovation, digital transformation, global access, care in all settings, and personalized healthcare journeys.
- Farrell emphasized the distinction between consumer wellness data and medical-grade diagnostics during a press conference.
AdvaMed has announced that Michael “Mick” Farrell, chairman and CEO of Resmed, is the new chair of the AdvaMed board of directors. Farrell began his two-year term in January 2026, succeeding Peter J. Arduini, president and CEO of GE HealthCare. AdvaMed is a membership-based trade organization for medical technology companies.
Farrell, who has served on the AdvaMed board since 2015, brings a specific focus on home-based care and digital health to the role. During a press conference, he outlined five strategic priorities for his tenure:
- patient-first innovation,
- digital transformation,
- global access,
- “care everywhere,” and
- personalization of the healthcare journey.
“I’m honored by the trust of my peers to serve as chair of AdvaMed,” says Farrell in a release.
Farrell’s Priorities for AdvaMed
In a press conference, Farrell said his first priority—patient-first innovation—centers on reasserting the patient as the medtech industry’s primary customer. He credited former AdvaMed chair Mike Minogue with sharpening that focus, noting that while medtech companies interact with physicians, health systems, payers, and governments, the ultimate customer is the person living with disease. Patient-first innovation, Farrell said, means orienting product development and business decisions around improving quality of life, longevity, and long-term disease management, rather than optimizing solely for institutional stakeholders.
The second priority, digital transformation, reflects what Farrell described as healthcare’s persistent inefficiencies compared with other industries. Drawing on his early career outside healthcare, he argued that digital tools—ranging from machine learning and artificial intelligence to generative AI—can streamline care delivery, reduce costs, and improve outcomes. Farrell noted that AdvaMed has formalized this focus through a dedicated digital health division and predicted an acceleration of AI- and GenAI-enabled medical products seeking FDA clearance, particularly those aimed at chronic disease management.
Global access, Farrell’s third priority, extends beyond US-centric manufacturing and policy discussions. He emphasized that medtech innovation should reach patients across all 200-plus countries, not just high-income markets. Achieving that, he said, will require new affordability models, including subscription-based approaches and closer collaboration with governments and payers, to ensure that digital, hardware, and software-based solutions are accessible worldwide.
The fourth priority, care everywhere, focuses on expanding care beyond traditional hospital settings. Farrell distinguished this from global access, describing it instead as a shift across sites of care—from acute hospital-based interventions to ambulatory surgery centers, outpatient clinics, and the home. He highlighted home-based care as a lower-cost, lower-acuity setting that can still deliver meaningful outcomes, particularly when supported by remote monitoring and connected devices. Wearables, he added, are already reshaping how patients engage with their health, creating new expectations for continuous access to care-related information.
The final priority, personalization of the healthcare journey, ties together digital tools, wearables, and clinical data. Farrell said the challenge for medtech is converting the growing volume of patient-generated data into actionable insights, while clarifying the line between wellness metrics and medical-grade diagnostics. He described a vision in which data such as sleep patterns, cardiovascular history, metabolic health, and even genomics are integrated into a holistic care model, enabling patients—working with clinicians—to make informed choices about therapies, specialists, and long-term care strategies.
Where Wellness Ends and Medical Care Begins
Farrell used the Q&A to put sharper edges on “digital transformation” for clinicians, arguing that the central regulatory task now is drawing a clear line between wellness outputs and medical claims that trigger FDA oversight and clinical pathways. He pointed to recent FDA thinking on general wellness and said AdvaMed plans to work with regulators and tech companies to clarify when a product is merely informational versus when it is screening or diagnosing a disorder and therefore requires clinician involvement, prescription workflows, and follow-up.
He also cited consumer-tech examples that he said pursued FDA clearance when they moved beyond wellness—referencing Apple and Samsung in the context of sleep apnea detection—and framed that as the model going forward as consumer and medical ecosystems converge.
As an example of how that distinction plays out in practice, Farrell pointed to ResMed’s recent FDA clearance of Smart Comfort, which he described as Resmed’s first artificial intelligence (AI)-powered product to move through a formal regulatory pathway. Rather than framing AI as an end in itself, Farrell said digital and AI-driven tools should be judged on whether they lower costs, improve outcomes, and deliver meaningful benefit in the management of chronic disease. He emphasized that while AdvaMed supports a broad ecosystem of consumer wearables and wellness technologies focused on lifestyle and self-management, products that cross into screening, diagnosis, or treatment must meet higher evidentiary and regulatory standards. Drawing a clear boundary between wellness information and medical decision-making, he said, is essential as digital capabilities expand and more data flows between consumer platforms, clinicians, and regulated medical devices.
AdvaMed Leadership Transition
Scott Whitaker, president and CEO of AdvaMed, expressed confidence in Farrell’s leadership ability to navigate the current healthcare environment.
“The entire board and the global industry AdvaMed represents are excited to have Mick as our chair during a rapidly evolving pace of medtech innovation,” says Whitaker in a release. “Whether in international forums or in the halls of the US Congress, Mick’s enthusiasm for the power of medtech to change lives is endless and contagious.”
Key achievements of Arduini’s tenure include:
- Establishment and integration of AdvaMed’s Imaging and Digital Health Tech divisions, contributing to a surge in membership from 398 companies to 615 companies.
- Accreditation of AdvaMed by the American National Standards Institute as a Standards Development Organization.
- The strongest momentum to date on the longstanding priority of Medicare coverage of FDA-designated and FDA-authorized breakthrough medtech, with overwhelming passage of legislation from a key congressional committee and support of the concept from top administration leaders.
- Final Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services regulations to expand access for millions of Medicare beneficiaries to diagnostic radiopharmaceuticals used to diagnose illnesses, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and certain types of cancer; computed tomography colonography; a category of digital mental health treatment devices; and non-opioid treatments for pain relief.
- A final regulation on the ethylene oxide used to sterilize half of all medical devices in the United States that was more workable than proposed.
- The first international MedTech Conference (Toronto 2024) and the biggest MedTech Conference in the United States (San Diego 2025).
