I am pleased to introduce Intuitive’s 2024 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Report.
At Intuitive, ESG is not an afterthought or a bolt-on department, it is woven into the fabric of our operations. Our efforts reflect our commitment to patients, surgeons, care teams, employees, and the environment. We start with the end in mind — our activities are guided by the value we wish to provide our stakeholders: improved health outcomes for patients, growth opportunities for our employees, and enduring value for the customers, patients, and communities we serve.
Since our founding 30 years ago, we have been dedicated to combining innovative technology with clinical expertise to deliver products and services that allow our customers to provide life-enhancing, minimally invasive care. To ensure continued alignment with the patients and healthcare community we serve, we have adopted the Quintuple Aim as our “North Star.” We seek to deliver better patient outcomes and improved patient and care team experiences, while lowering treatment costs, reducing the duration of hospital admissions, and enabling access to care.
Aligned with our cultural value of humility, our innovation process begins with working alongside, listening to, and learning from our customers and the patients they treat. We ask how we can apply our experience and technology to advance the Quintuple Aim by solving our customers’ most relevant clinical and operational problems: from improving patient outcomes to helping address healthcare workforce and productivity challenges.
This year, we took several significant steps to advance these aims.
Innovation
We released our most advanced surgical platform ever, the da Vinci 5 surgical system. This new system helps deliver improved efficiency for customers while providing increased computing power that provides a foundation for a future of impactful digital tools. Da Vinci 5 brings to our customers a host of refinements and some first-of-their-kind technologies that we believe will drive improvements to the Quintuple Aim.
We also continue to invest in technologies and studies that can expand the number of patients who can benefit from our technologies. We do this by increasing the types of procedures that can be performed using our platforms, obtaining regulatory clearances for new indications for use, and bringing these new indications to countries around the globe.
Our ecosystem of services and support continues to develop in step with our technology. From remote telementoring capabilities to our Genesis customer consultations, we are empowering healthcare providers with the skills and resources they need to meet their clinical and economic goals.
Clinical evidence
We are committed to supporting the generation of clinical evidence and peer-reviewed evaluations of our technology and services so that we, our customers, and healthcare systems can objectively evaluate our progress.
In this year’s report, we highlight the COMPARE Study, one of thousands of publications examining robotic-assisted surgery in 2024. The COMPARE Study demonstrates that our products and services can deliver differentiated results compared to the next-best surgical alternatives, including shorter recovery times and reduced reinterventions.
Access to minimally invasive care
In 2023, we followed the Institute for Healthcare Improvement1 in moving from the Quadruple Aim to the Quintuple Aim — which now includes a focus on access to care. In 2024, we established the Health Policy & Patient Access Research Center of Excellence to study the impact of our products and services on access to high-quality, minimally invasive care, leading to peer review and publication of articles that support this work. These studies are expected to start publishing in 2025.
We are committed to expanding access to high-quality, minimally invasive care by partnering with hospitals, healthcare systems, and patient advocacy groups to identify and overcome barriers to care. These can include limited provider access across different sites of care or different times of day/days of the week, training, technological availability, and other factors.
Together, we are shaping a future where minimally invasive care is the standard, not the exception.
We remain steadfast in our purpose, driven by the conviction that minimally invasive care is life-enhancing care. While Intuitive is 30 years old, the opportunity for improvement in the Quintuple Aim is substantial, and we are still in the early stages of realizing the potential that technology-enabled ecosystems like ours can deliver to healthcare.
Thank you for your continued support in advancing this vision.