Next session we have one of our great supporters of today's conversation, Tom Polen, who's chairman and CEO of Becton Dickinson and Company, to talk about the invisible infrastructure, how we're looking at AI innovation in healthcare companies. Thank you so much. You know, I told you all today that I was going to buy you drinks at five o'clock. It's actually not true. Tom's buying the drinks. It sounds okay. Tom's going to buy the drinks.
Uh, I don't know how much of this you've caught today, but we're having a good time.
We're also having a serious time. I mean, we're kind of looking at both the challenges, the realities, but also the opportunities. I would like you, Tom, to give the room an understanding of the vital key role that BD plays in this healthcare ecosystem. And by the way, thank you for supporting this conference on bold bets. So give them a quick picture, but then really what I want to talk about is how you see technology and AI creating a bump up and what we're able to do and how we ought to be thinking about the healthcare ecosystem.
Sure. Again, thanks for having me and obviously very pleased to support who's watching. I love seeing the logo behind everyone's head from the green room. So, if you're not familiar with BD, I would consider and I think most hospital CEOs would consider us the most consequential medical technology company in America. And the reason for that is nine out of 10 people going into a hospital will be touched by our products. So, think about a syringe. 70% of all healthcare requires something as basic as a syringe to be delivered. 90% of all syringes in America, we make them in Nebraska. We make them in Connecticut. 70% of all IV catheters, which are pretty much in every patient's arm to deliver the therapies that we've been talking about, we make in Salt Lake City, Utah. We also make advanced things like the robotics that are running Amazon's retail sites that are shipping drugs to your home. We make those implantable stents, grafts, AI devices that are monitoring patients. So, we're about 20 billion in revenue. We make 35 billion devices a year at 27 manufacturing plants across America. We have other plants outside of the US, but again our scale is unmatched. 190 countries around the world, 35 billion devices, we touch every human on the planet roughly five times a year.
Wow, that's staggering. So how is AI changing the game for you?
It's a very exciting time both in the company that helps us drive efficiencies and productivity. Two-thirds of our associates are in our manufacturing plants. So, we use it there. We use it in our R&D processes, but when it comes to patient care, we really see it having breakthrough transformation on both the cost and the quality. A few ways that we're using AI, we use AI as an example. We talked about and the congressman just spoke about the pharmacy. So, in the future, and I was on the board of Walgreens before we took it private. In fairness, over time, I would imagine 10 years from now, not many people here will be going into your retail pharmacy to pick up your prescription. If you're going to be on statins or GLP-1s for the rest of your life, those should just be delivered to your house. And those will be robots using AI as well that'll be checking every pill to make sure it's the exact number of pills, no medication errors. Stats are I think 4% of prescriptions at a retail pharmacy have errors because you don't count pills perfectly and put them in amber vials. We do that with 100% accuracy. That's AI doing that. In more advanced ways, we use AI in the ICU. As an example today, monitoring technologies that are looking at people's blood pressure not like you would use with a blood pressure cuff, but we look at it pulse by pulse of your heart every single beat and how your blood pressure is changing using advanced technologies. It's hemodynamic monitoring. We now have AI applications that are approved by the FDA that will say your blood pressure is about to drop 15 minutes from now. So before the patient alarms go off and harm's happening to the patient, we're predicting therapy. And now we have technologies that are working, putting AI in our pumps that will auto adjust the infusion to the patient so that side effect never happens and the nurse never even needs to run in and try to prevent it. But that'll be autonomous systems augmenting patient care. Because today, the way that things work is a doctor will say, 'Take this medication every four hours in the hospital.' And then your body gets out of line, alarms go off on the sensors on you, and then they try to get you back in line. In the meanwhile, bad things are happening to your body. Your blood pressure is not meant to swing, for example. It hurts organs, it hurts your brain, it hurts a lot of things. And what should really happen is someone say not take this drug every so often. Keep this patient's vitals in this range. Keep their blood pressure 120 over 80. And AI and the technologies, the devices will be continually adapting and keeping the patients perfectly. That's not that far away. I mean, those are things in our innovation pipeline that we have submission dates to FDA in our plan. So, it's really revolutionizing care and how it's delivered.
You know, about 10 years ago, I interviewed then Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the talk was artificial intelligence in the coming era. It was a long time ago. And I asked him, 'What would make Americans fall in love with AI?' And he said, 'The first thing is going to be much better health diagnostics and the second was going to have to do with fraud, identity fraud and all that stuff.' I don't know if he was right on number two, but on number one clearly you see a revolution in health diagnostics. I mean the things you're describing are part of that. I don't know if there's wide recognition of the advancements there, but there is just a huge shift, huge improvement in health diagnostics. But one of the things that's weird for me is how bad the pharmaceutical industry and the medical health industry is at bragging about that. Like I don't think many people are walking around realizing the stack. Is it because they don't want to say how bad things were before or why do you think?
It's a good question. I do think generally, if I look at associates at BD, we have 800 nurses that work at BD. We have hundreds of pharmacists. We have hundreds and hundreds of doctors. They just focus on the patient. It's why they're in our industry. We have a saying in BD, we're very blessed to be able to fulfill our life's work through our work life. And I think generally that's a concept across healthcare where they just focus on more patient impact rather than pause and brag about it. It's just not in the industry's genetics. It's probably something we should do.
I do think it would help people understand the value of AI if more people talked about these net benefits as you were just doing. I think our customers all know about it and are extremely excited about it. And again, on labor, you talked about shortages. I was with a group the other day and the biggest shortage area, we talk about healthcare jobs are growing in the US. Many people aren't necessarily aware that those aren't the doctor jobs growing, it's not the nurses jobs growing. In fact, three-quarters of new healthcare jobs in America are home health aids. And that's only going to continue to increase as people are aging. Finding home health aids is extremely difficult and that's where the jobs are booming. It's not improbable that we'll all have humanoids at our house as our home health aids. And when you ask patients, that's actually what they want. They want a humanoid robot helper. If you need someone to assist you going into the restroom or taking a shower, do you want a human or would you rather have a really effective humanoid that's helping you do that? I think you're going to see that in the future.
Well, back to this, part of this is we didn't coordinate on this at all. Do you know Eric Topol?
Eric Topol is a friend of mine. I don't know if any of you know Eric Topol. He is a very interesting doctor. He's at Scripps and he is challenging all of the kind of standard practices of how doctors deliver health. And one of his favorite lines is the stethoscope is stupid. It doesn't do anything. It's silly to have, you wear them for performative doctor stuff. I'm interested in that. But as you look at the devices you're actually producing and building and evolving, are you going through a constant change? Are we going to see a change in the kinds of gadgets and widgets you make? Are those going to change? Because I think Eric is right but I'm not sure. He obviously has a very good book. He's a futurist in healthcare. Recommend to read his book if you haven't.
For sure. So for example, we invented, every single one of you have definitely had our devices inside of you. If you've ever had your blood drawn, 90% of all blood in America is drawn with our needles that go in your body. And the whole concept of the little tubes that evacuate, we invented that concept.
You talk about it so enthusiastically.
We're proud of it. But that will all change in the future. We're now working on technology that you'll draw your blood by yourself at your house. And so that will shift. You won't have to go into a lab and have someone stick something in your vein. 10 years from now, you'll be drawing blood by yourself at your house and just call in and someone...
Why 10 years away? Why not two years away?
I think healthcare change is slow. Technology is becoming available in the nearer term, but it's very rare to see healthcare shift. There's big infrastructure. Even things as simple as the infrastructure of all the lines that fit certain size tubes has to get changed out to actually do things at scale. Big infrastructures have been built, but that's all coming. We have in the hospitals the infusion platforms that put big guardrails and safety around complex infusions. We have technologies that are bringing that into the home. We have wearables that are in our pipeline. We have technologies that we invented, PureWick for example, is one of our products for urinary incontinence in hospitals. That's our fastest growing segment, helping treat urinary incontinence in the home. And now we have mobile versions that people will be able to walk around the streets of DC and manage that condition. So we're investing very heavily. There are three areas that we invest about a billion dollars a year. The biggest number one is smart connected care, the use of AI, robotics, informatics to transform the cost and quality of care which we've talked about. The second one is enabling care to shift to new care settings including specifically the home. And the third one is we invest heavily in technologies that improve outcomes for patients with chronic disease. Devices like you see drugs now, devices are changing the outcomes for patients.
How are you simulating that? Because one of the things I know you're thinking about is what do you do when you've got not enough nurses? We're getting older. The caregiving dimension for a lot of what's going on with older Americans is really tough on families. You've got a shortage of nurses and docs, you've got a shortage of just about everything. I'm interested in how BD in that space because it's basically stressed out. My brother's a nurse in an elder care facility on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. They're stressed out. Never have enough people, double shifts, crazy times. It's unsustainable. So as you're beginning to simulate out like a war game, how are you going to deal with those shortages?
So I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, just outside of Eastern Maryland. Very close to where you are.
Very good. I knew I liked you.
Well, I'll have you over for a crabfest.
I would love that. You can't get crabs. I live in New Jersey now and for some reason there's this line around Delaware where you can't get blue crabs above it. So I always have to go south to get crabs.
