AdvaMed, the medtech industry's largest lobbying group, said Monday it will build cross-industry standards covering cybersecurity, privacy and interoperability. Mick Farrell, the group's board chair and chief executive of ResMed, announced the plan at a press event during The MedTech Conference, running October 18 to 21 in Boston. He compared the effort to a code of ethics for the sector.
Farrell pointed to a year that hit five of the industry's largest names. Stryker and Boston Scientific both disclosed 2026 incidents that disrupted manufacturing and shipping. Intuitive, Medtronic and Abbott reported attacks of their own. "Anybody can be impacted at any time," Farrell said.
The standards target smaller manufacturers specifically. Farrell said companies without Stryker's or Boston Scientific's security budgets are the most exposed, and AdvaMed wants to give them a baseline instead of leaving each vendor to write its own playbook. Kirsten Tullia, the group's executive director of digital health tech, said AdvaMed is also setting up forums for chief information security officers and other training.
A trade association standard carries no enforcement teeth, but it does set the floor regulators and customers will expect of every member going forward. Farrell's own company sells cloud-connected sleep apnea machines, and he said that connectivity demands ongoing security spending, not a one-time fix. For a manufacturer with no CISO and no dedicated security team, that floor may be the first real benchmark it gets.