Medtronic's strong earnings reassure defibrillator industry

Medical technology company Medtronic's stocks surged 5 percent Tuesday in the wake of strong earnings reports, while rivals on implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICD) market saw similar gains in the neighborhood of 4 percent, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal reports. ICDs monitor patient's hearts and shock them when they fall out of beat. The market for the devices was believed to be in a slowdown lately. The recent Medtronic report helped "shrug off" those concerns (Kamp, 10/24).

The strong earnings were good news for companies competing in the ICD market, the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog reports. "Last month, earnings reports from Boston Scientific and St. Jude suggested that demand for ICDs might be even weaker than expected with questions of whether the devices were being overused. But on a conference call today, Medtronic's CEO said he hadn't seen a slowdown in the overall market for the devices — good news not only for Medtronic, but also for its competitors" (Goldstein, 11/24).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.