Lisa Earnhardt

Company: AbbottTitle: Executive Vice President & Group President, Medical DevicesIndustry: HealthcareNotable in 2024: Earnhardt oversaw the launch of Lingo, a wearable disease-prevention device that uses AI to track glucose levels and guide the user to healthier habits.

Chronic diseases are the leading cause of illness, disability, and death in the United States, driving 90% of annual health-care expenditures, according to the CDC. Heart disease and stroke are the top killers, while close to 40 million Americans have diabetes, and another 100 million prediabetics are on a path to end up with the condition.

As executive vice president of Abbott's medical devices division, Lisa Earnhardt, who has built a career at the intersection of innovation and health care, is leading the development of life-saving and life-changing medical devices, from the latest breakthroughs in pacemakers to novel glucose monitoring.

"I think about the chronic conditions that are just in my portfolio between cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic pain movement disorders, there's a high probability that over the course of a year you're going to know someone, whether it be a family member or a close friend who suffers from that. So, it does become personal very, very quickly," Earnhardt said in a 2023 podcast appearance.

Diabetes is a prime example of how Abbott is changing the nature of treatment options. Last year, it received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for two new continuous glucose monitoring systems, both available over the counter without a prescription.

A CGM is a small sensor that tracks a person's glucose levels in real time under the skin, and sends data to a smartphone, alerting patients, families and practitioners to potential dangers. While Abbott already has millions of people around the world using CGM technology, the 2024 approvals open up two major new patient categories. Patients with Type 2 diabetes who don't take insulin have potential access to the Libre Rio system, while consumers trying to improve general health and wellness can be offered Lingo.

There are few jobs at Abbott more important than Earnhardt's. In fact, Abbott CEO Robert Ford had the job before her, and she was hired as his replacement after he had moved up to chief operating officer. The medical device business is the company's largest segment, responsible for almost half of its revenue, $19 billion of $42 billion last year, with a growing profile for the CGMs, which hit $1.8 billion in sales, above a 20% growth rate.

As Ford said on a recent earnings call, the new CGMs have "mass-market potential — as long as you stay ahead from a technology perspective, as long as you stay ahead from a scale perspective, as long as you stay ahead from a cost perspective."

The company has forecast Lingo alone as a "multi-billion dollar opportunity."

Earnhardt says Lingo brings an entirely new way of thinking to the company, moving from the "highly technical and clinically oriented heart health" to consumer biowearables, "a brand-new business for us" she said, that uses algorithms and AI to learn about the relationship between glucose levels and areas like sleep health, mood regulation, and weight management.

"It's really helping people live their healthiest lives through information. ... The need we're meeting is very different in terms of living a healthy life versus saving a life, for example, which is what we do in some of our cardiovascular products," she said in the 2023 podcast.