The Buzz at JP Morgan--Devices: No Longer the Conference Stepchild

The JP Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference—a.k.a. H&Q—is the first major medical business gathering of the year, and, with 6,700 attendees, certainly the largest. As important for business development and M&A executives as it is for investors, the meeting—280 presentations and millions of hallway and cocktail party conversations--is the best place to gauge industry sentiment, to sound the investor mood, and to try to predict not merely how different segments will perform, but how they'll influence each other. In the following two articles, we attempt to do just that.

Woody Allen once complained of a restaurant that "the food was lousy and the portions were small." Device companies have...