I really have enjoyed that part of my journey overall.

Host: So, building on that, as SVP of IT at Android Dynamics, how has IT evolved under your leadership?

Kim: Under my leadership, I think IT has evolved to the point where we are much more involved. And I mentioned being aligned with strategic objectives. A long time ago, when I started my journey in IT, we were very tactical.

You know, we were handing out cell phones and computers. And that was part of our role overall. And that is so different now.

We are definitely very embedded in the business overall. And we're trying to make sure that we are meeting the needs of our end users. I always say to my team, people's expectations of technology at work are set at home.

You know, IT is not just handing out that computer that we're talking on today. And we're not just handing out that cell phone. But those devices are setting the expectations for what people want and need to do at work.

And so, it's impossible for us to separate ourselves from that. And we need to continue to evolve and make sure that we are keeping an eye on those sorts of things. So, you know, making sure the team is involved and embedded in different parts of the business is also part of that.

Because I don't work, for example, in the finance department, but I need to know what the finance department's needs are so our team can better serve the community at large.

Host: Great, great perspective. So, moving along, cardiovascular disease and cancer are two major global challenges. So how does AngioDynamics tackle both through its portfolio?

Kim: I have to start by saying it's impossible for any one of us to say that in our circle, whether that be a family member, a friend, a co-worker, or even yourself, you know, that we haven't been impacted by something related to cardiovascular disease or cancers. I know personally, I have been affected by both in my immediate family. And even when I was starting to look at AngioDynamics as a potential employer, I was very intrigued by our NanoKnife system because unfortunately my own mother passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2010.

And so our technologies really help pave the way and help people with some really challenging health problems. And it's important that, you know, I'm thinking about it on a daily basis because it is personal for people. I will also add that AngioDynamics, you know, we're a company that's over 30 years old, and we haven't always been focused in these spaces.

We began as a device company back in the day, and we began very effectively innovating in the catheter arena. And through a number of acquisitions, we actually grew to do a bit of everything. We had a broad portfolio, but what we really lacked was focus.

So, several years ago, we actually took the initiative to take a look across that broad portfolio and figure out who did we want to be? Who are the patients that we could best serve? And so, when we looked at that broad portfolio, we made the decision to make some key divestitures.

We sold parts of our business to companies that were certainly better stewards of those businesses than AngioDynamics were. And we have been very successful in now being able to focus in that cardiovascular and that oncology space. And I'm going to say those divestitures, while they sound easy, you know, you're just going to sell off part of the company, they're not always easy.

You know, we asked a lot of the people that worked here, and we did our best to make sure that those businesses could thrive in their new environments and that we could focus and take those divestitures and turn that into gold for AngioDynamics. And meaning we could take that divestiture and invest now in key technologies that we determined were going to be our new North Star. And so, with those investments, we doubled down.

We, for example, have invested a large degree in our R&D portfolios to make sure that our technologies are doing great things going forward. We've improved our devices. We've done some really innovative things with some of those technologies and focused on our med tech business to make that an even stronger arm for ourselves.

And the other thing that we did is we also invested greatly in our regulatory pathways and indications on a lot of our devices because we knew that our devices could really add great value in the marketplace and to our patient community in certain areas. And I'll give you a couple of examples of those. We had our APEX study, which was really focused on our AlphaVac system, and that was for the treatment of pulmonary embolisms.

We've had our Pathfinder study, which is our Arion system, and that was a post-market registry for peripheral artery disease, PAD, and success there. And then finally, our PRESERVE study, which we've heard a lot about lately, which is our NanoKnife system. And NanoKnife is an ablation system, which uses irreversible electro pronation technology, IRE as we call it.

And what that does is this was a focus on prostate for patients with intermediate risk prostate cancer. And we were successful in getting our FDA clearance last year in that arena. So really exciting stuff going on and really great areas for us to focus and really put our money where our mouth is.

We believe in our products, excuse me, and we know that they can do great things for our patients.

Host: That's such a powerful approach wherein technology meeting a purpose. And now, speaking of NanoKnife, congratulations on being recognized by TIME as one of the best inventions of 2025 for the NanoKnife systems. What does this recognition mean to you and your team?

Kim: Yeah, the recognition, you know, first, we are so grateful for TIME Magazine to recognize us as one of their best inventions. It was independently submitted. And so this is something that even makes it more valuable because it's not something that Angio has actively went out and sought.

But the fact that we received that award, you know, has been just a tremendous push for us internally. It makes knowing that the work that we're doing is really worth it. And until recently, I think talking about prostate cancer and the NanoKnife FDA approval, I think that it's important to talk about that because until recently, prostate cancer patients really had some options, but some of them could have some different effects.

You know, you could have had a surgical procedure. You could have done radiation therapy. You can do things like chemo or even hormone therapies or even active surveillance, which is a lot.

A lot of patients actually choose because perhaps their PSA scores aren't as high. And they're just saying, hey, you know what? We're going to keep an eye on this with the active surveillance with our physicians.

And so what NanoKnife offered is another option. This technology is actually tissue ablation that targets cancer cells and can preserve healthy tissue and structure around a tumor itself. So many of the treatments, particularly for prostate cancer, could have some real lifestyle impacts and adverse effects to them.

You know, things like incontinence, erectile dysfunction, those are a couple of the real serious outcomes that could have been seen by these patients. And what NanoKnife aims to do is minimize a lot of those outcomes themselves. The other thing it does, there's not only the patient that is affected, but it's also the family members and the community that surround those patients.

And NanoKnife can also be a good option for those patients to help minimize a lot of the impacts from a patient perspective and from a family and lifestyle perspective. It's important for me to say, though, NanoKnife is not for everyone. You know, those patients that do seek out that treatment, and it is right for them. However, we're starting to hear more and more stories from those patient communities that have had those procedures and have had such a positive outcome.

Those real world stories are really what's fueling us inside here, because we know that we can do so much more with NanoKnife itself. So, we have the prostate, like I said, indication. We also have physicians that use NanoKnife to treat other organs, and we hope to expand indications in the future as we look at NanoKnife as a technology that can be adopted across different practices within the field.

But our goal is to continue to make NanoKnife a named standard of care for tissue ablation. And what we, you know, with the Time Magazine recognition, again, going back, we are so honored that they have recognized us as one of the best inventions. You know, we want to shout it from the treetops because we believe in our product and we know what we can do, and we know it can do really good things with our patient community.

So we're looking forward to many more years to come in the success of NanoKnife, and hopefully we can treat so many more patients with good outcomes.

Host: That's amazing. So, Kim, you've led cloud transformation projects across large enterprises. What have been the biggest challenges and wins in that journey?

Kim: Yeah, you know, cloud models have changed tremendously over the past few years, and even more so the past couple of decades. You know, I can remember back, gosh, this is going almost 20 years ago when Salesforce was just coming on the scene. Now, everybody's heard of Salesforce, right?

We were looking at it at the time as a CRM system, and it was one of the first real commercial cloud technologies that were out there. And I can remember at the time we didn't choose Salesforce because it was a cloud technology. It was, you know, it was Greenfield.

We really didn't know what to do. And now I would say I'd struggle to select a technology platform that wasn't cloud. We are a cloud-first environment.

We look at that as the benefits to that are our ability to scale on so many different areas. You know, back in the day, you know, IT organizations used to want to touch everything, right? We had a network operations center.

We had DBAs that lived in-house. We had enterprise application. You know, my team was probably two to three times the size that I need today because of the cloud environments.

It really has changed everything. The IT team overall, I will say over time, both IT and the business had to change, however, to adopt those cloud technologies. And I would say the biggest challenge in that, first and foremost, was hearts and minds.

Like I said, people love to go up and, you know, feel and touch and push buttons and, you know, walk away with that backup tape in their hand. And this has changed the game. And getting people used to that new environment where they don't always have that, you know, intimate control of everything has really changed how IT teams need to work.

I think that the biggest challenge also was everybody gets sold a bill of goods, if you would, if you're trying to move from an on-prem to a cloud technologies. Migration of those tools are always kind of pitched as, oh, you know, you're going to take your data, you're going to do some setup and configuration and all, you're going to flick a switch and away you go. And none of those projects are that easy.

You know, they are involved and they need a lot of attention and attention to detail. They need good partners within your business to make sure you're serving the needs of the community that's going to use these tools at the end of the day. So migration is never easy.

And I'm in a regulated environment. We are a public company. So we're beholding to the SEC and the needs of that.

And we're also a med device, highly regulated, you know, in environments from an FDA and also our international regulations that we have to be paying attention to. So we have to make sure that we're prioritizing and understanding what those changing, you know, tides are all the time and make sure that we're compliant. However, I will say that cloud models also offer a ton of opportunity.

I said scale earlier. We could scale environments. We can scale data.

We can scale our team and partner with people that are experts in different areas to flex our muscle and make ourselves better. We can streamline our focus as the people that physically sit within AngioDynamics and our team. And then, you know, ultimately our job is to support Angio.

I don't want my team necessarily to be an expert in data center operations. We have good partners that can do that now in cloud environments. And with the emergence of generative AI technologies, you know, it makes that new green field even more exciting to kind of move towards.

I'm looking forward to some of the things that AI can offer us. Absolutely.

Host: And building on that, we all know that cybersecurity is critical in med tech. So what are some of the biggest challenges companies face in protecting sensitive data today?

Kim: Yeah, you know, I mentioned AI and that adds just a different degree of complexity into cybersecurity challenges, but some good and some more challenging than others. I think that the most significant cybersecurity challenges are in the constant change and shifts in the focus of, I'll say, bad actors and how they're trying to, you know, attack from different vectors. You know, we can do all that we can to support the multiple environments that our teams work within.

You know, I think we have to think of them in different categories. For example, you have buildings and infrastructure, meaning, you know, there's HVAC systems that run in here. We all heard about the big target snafu that happened a few years ago.

And we have security systems in all of those buildings. We also have employees, you know, that not only work in our offices, but they work in remote offices, and they travel all over the world. We have people in all corners of the world with different threat severity, depending upon where they physically live versus where they physically are.

You know, and that may be very different on a day-to-day basis. So, we really need to be paying attention to how they're traveling, how they're using their equipment and those sorts of things. Enterprise applications also, we have many of them.

And all of those, particularly those that are in the cloud, we need to be sure and confident that we can maintain the cybersecurity profiles that are required to keep those areas safe. And then any connected device that we have, you know, any connected device that you may take your laptop home and work remotely, that is now connected to a different type of network. And how are you getting into the company assets?

Or how are we continuing to protect those company assets? I will say, everybody always assumes cybersecurity is an IT responsibility as well. The responsibility of cybersecurity, we look at it at AngioDynamics.

It is the responsibility of all of our employees. We do proper training. We try to make sure that people understand how to use technology, where to use technology, and the right way to use technology to keep them and AngioDynamics safe.

It's funny, you know, we roll out training. We have annual cybersecurity training that, of course, everybody takes, and everybody that's on board takes. And it's interesting.

I've had more conversations with people that say, that cybersecurity training not only helped me at work, it has helped me at home to understand how my family is using computers, their iPhones and that, and make sure that I'm protecting my own assets, not just AngioDynamics. We've added another layer of complexity here at Angio as well. As we think about our MedTech platforms, these are our products, AngioDynamics, NanoKnife, our Ariane products.

These are hardware devices with embedded software that are going into hospitals and clinics. What we want to make sure now that we're looking at those customer sites and be cognizant of the needs at those locations so we can continue to innovate our own product line while keeping our customer populations safe. And that includes not only the physicians, the clinicians, the healthcare practitioners, but that also includes our patients.

We want to make sure that we're keeping everybody safe from the cybersecurity perspective.

Host: Amazing. I know we've spoken about leadership earlier, and here you're known for a collaborative leadership style. So how do you empower your teams to stay innovative while staying aligned with your business goals?

Kim: Such a great question. I like to think that my job starts with listening and developing a trusted relationship. I always lead with the, everybody is trying to do good, right?

At the end of the day, I trust my team. And my job is to shepherd people. I help them focus and I help them to prioritize what the needs of their business are against the projects that they're being asked to do or the tasks that they need to do.

And I want to make sure that my team all the time knows what the strategy of the company is so they can equate the work that they're doing or ask questions and say, hey, listen, this is a project that's come up. I'm not sure it aligns with the strategy that we're trying to achieve or hey, this is a direct line strategic move. I'm going to prioritize this because we are moving in this direction.

And so my job is to help my team understand that. And I also like to give my team a fair degree of autonomy. They should be able to make decisions on their own.

I mean, I am not ever going to claim to be, when it comes to the technology, the smartest person in the room. I always laugh and ask a lot of questions. And I say, hey, you know, I know enough to be dangerous, but you're the expert here.

Help me to learn what we need to do to advance in whatever arena from a technology perspective and make us better as a company. But trusting the people that I work with is a large part of that, trusting them to make the right decision on behalf of Angio. That being said, you know, we meet regularly.

I want to hear what they have to say. I want to hear what their opinions are. And like I said, I ask a lot of questions.

They probably sometimes scratch their head, why she's asking so many questions. But I think it's important for me to try to understand where they're coming from. You know, I always say, you know, that, you know, forward movement is part of what we need to be doing, advancing AngioDynamics.

Perfection is not required, but forward movement is. Because sometimes we can get caught in analyzing far too much or trying to make sure every single corner of the room is dusted before we move things forward. I'm saying, guys, I trust you to make the decision based upon a fair amount of knowledge, and we balance that with risk, right?

And my role is, like I said, to help them understand where we can take on that risk and where we should be cautious and move ahead a little bit more carefully. And then, you know, at the end of the day, I also want the team overall, not just the IT team, but anybody that works here, I want them to see that anything that they do is contributing at the end of the day to making AngioDynamics a better steward of our products and the patients that they serve. So there are days, certainly, we all have work that we might not care to do.

It might be a maintenance activity. It might be something really cool, fun, you know, a sexy new project. But any one of those activities, I want to draw that direct line.

There's a thread of every piece of work that we do that directly impacts our products, our physicians, our practitioner community, and ultimately our patients. And I want to make sure that the team understands that.

Host: Love that, love that. On that note, AngioDynamics often talks about going beyond procedures. So what does that mean for the company and your customers?

Kim: Yeah, going beyond procedures is such a great mantra for us. I think primarily of two communities that we serve when we are thinking about going beyond procedures. You know, certainly we have our medical technology and our medical device, things that we put in the hands of people.

But ultimately going beyond procedures, it's what are we doing with those physicians? What are we doing for those patients? And how are we listening to them?

And we've been doing some really great things of late that have directly connected us to those communities. The first thing I'll focus on is our physician community, our practitioner community, if you would, because some of those are nurses. Some of them are clinicians.

You know, there's a variety of different people. But what we have been doing of late has been, you know, having in-person events. Two of them, most recently, we had our cardiovascular scientific forum, and we've also had an international symposium, which just ended a couple of days ago.

Both are events where we have an opportunity to bring physicians together in a single space with not only AngioDynamics employees, but more with each other to facilitate conversations. This isn't an advertising campaign for AngioDynamics. These are opportunities for us to get together with our physician community, to have them teach each other how they are treating different things, whether it be in the cardiovascular space or the oncology space, and have those deep conversations that not only help us discover how we can improve our products going forward, but it also helps us to understand how the physicians are talking to one another and what their needs are and how they can then meet the needs of the patient communities that they serve. And so another piece that we're doing, I'll talk about the patients because the patient part to me is probably the newest and most exciting piece of it. Particularly after we received the prostate indication, what we've been doing is a lot of social media campaigns and outreach to patient and physician communities to understand what their needs were or to tell them about NanoKnife, right?

We wanna shout it from the rooftops. And we have had such incredible outreach from patients or people looking for treatment that we actually have put key things in place that help those patient communities. These patients are now able to talk to somebody.

We have somebody here that works at AngioDynamics and we do active outreach to patients that are looking for more information to help connect them to the right physician so they can talk about treatment options so they can understand what the environment, for example, reimbursement and how to get these procedures done within the insurance system themselves and even help to connect them directly with physicians if they don't even wanna talk to somebody. So we have a physician locator on our website that people can go and they can find physicians within their own region as well that are educated and have used NanoKnife to treat a variety of different things.

So, our patient outreach part of our operation is definitely the new and exciting part. And that is, like I said, going beyond just caring for everything. We wanna make sure that we understand what our physician, our healthcare provider community looks like and our patients.

They're an important part of our future.

Host: Thank you for sharing that. And before we wrap up, what advice would you give to future IT leaders who want to drive innovation while staying compliant in regulated industries like healthcare?

Kim: Regulated industries certainly can, it adds a certain challenge. But that being said, I always want to make sure that we're keeping an eye on new technologies and how they can help to enhance what we are doing at AngioDynamics because like I said, a lot of those expectations from the phone that you're carrying around your hand are set at home. But I wanna make sure that we're doing it in a way and it can be challenging in a regulated environment.

That being said, I would say stay creative because there are ways to get new technologies and enhance your operations, your customer outreach, your finance department, your marketing, whatever it might be. There are ways to do that really creatively, even in a regulated environment. I don't think anybody should be doing it irresponsibly but keep your eyes open because the next best thing might be right around the corner and you could really accelerate how you're providing care to people.

So, I would say, like I said, keep your eyes open. Everything is a green field in front of you and you really should be exploring how you can continue to improve your business overall.

Host: Absolutely! Kim, this has been such an insightful and inspiring conversation. Thank you so much for walking us through your journey, your leadership approach, and how AngioDynamics is pushing the boundaries of healthcare tech.

Kim: Thank you so much. It's been a great conversation and I'm really looking forward to seeing where Angio goes in the future. So, thank you.

Host: And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in to Extra Mile by KnowledgeNile. I'm your host, Sayali signing off. See you next time with another inspiring leader redefining the future of technology.

Until then, stay tuned!