BOSTON — In an era of heightened tariff volatility and geopolitical risk, medtech companies are rewriting their supply chain playbooks to ensure patients have uninterrupted access to critical therapies, executives said Monday at AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference.
After coping with semiconductor shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic and tariff pressures, medtech companies are facing another semiconductor crisis in 2026, said Jon Rennert, chairman of Zoll Medical, a maker of automated external defibrillators and other devices for emergency and critical care. The artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout has medical device makers competing with demand from data centers for semiconductor chips.
“There’s been more supply chain disruption to the medtech industry in the last five years than at any point that I’ve seen in my career, and I imagine many of you feel the same way,” Rennert told a conference audience.
To ensure consistent supply, Zoll has made strategic investments in inventory, Rennert said. While expensive, the strategy buys lead time and the ability to respond when things change.
“Just-in-time inventory was never really a big deal in healthcare. I would say to the degree that it ever was, it’s dead now,” Rennert said.
Zoll has worked to protect its critical supply of electronics by helping chip suppliers understand the importance of its devices to patients. Historically, the company didn’t have relationships with leading chip suppliers, instead buying its electronic boards from contract manufacturers.
“I don’t think that the big players have visibility on how important our products are, how impactful they are to patients if they’re not available,” Rennert said. “We’re a small demand stream, and while all the AI companies may be bidding up supply components, if they could allocate just a little bit for us, it would make a big difference to patients.”
Constant scenario planning is needed to meet customers’ requirements, which have only gotten deeper and more precise, said Heather Knight, chief commercial officer at Solventum. The 3M healthcare spinoff’s businesses include wound care, infection prevention, dental products and health information systems.
Supply disruptions can take the form of weather events, cybersecurity issues, geopolitical tensions or a supplier suddenly discontinuing a component that is necessary to finish a product. But with 30,000 SKUs, it is not possible for Solventum to build redundancy across its entire portfolio, said Knight.
She recommended prioritizing life-saving products that customers are dependent on, “and then building resiliency backward from there.”
Vantive CEO Christopher Toth said organizations should have a disaster recovery plan that includes a point person and steps to follow, an integrated business planning process that matches events in the field to what the supply chain is saying, and regional leaders that are accountable for the inventory held.
“Now they have skin in the game, and so when a decision is taken, if we want to increase inventory, it costs something relative to their [profit and loss], but it’s also a calculated decision where they have shared responsibility,” said Toth.
Vantive was formed in 2025 when Baxter sold its kidney care business to the Carlyle Group. Home dialysis is a big focus for the company, and in many of its markets, patients depend on solutions that clear toxins from the body to be shipped to their homes.
Vantive has 20 global manufacturing facilities. If suddenly those products could not get to a home, it would be catastrophic, said Toth. He encouraged companies to think of manufacturing or supply chain footprints not as a cost, but as a competitive advantage, because the billions of dollars invested in infrastructure creates a hurdle for a competitor to enter the market.
To simplify supply chains, Solventum’s Knight suggested organizations “look at where you can buy where you make and then make where you sell. So you’re not shipping product all over the globe.” As part of scenario planning that can save time when a disruption strikes, companies should examine their portfolios to find where products can be proactively cross-registered with regulators in different geographies.
Rennert said Zoll has faced disruption from suppliers closing plants when other customers stopped buying from them because of tariffs. The company has had to develop relationships with parallel suppliers that have excess capability to front-load Zoll’s project if needed. It has meant working two or three times as hard to stay ahead in the current environment than was necessary five years ago, Rennert said.
“From a company perspective, our philosophy is we need to do our jobs as if each patient is our mother, father, brother, sister, child because it is someone’s mother, father, brother, sister, child,” said Vantive’s Toth.
