Business Description

and its wholly and majority-owned subsidiaries. Product and brand names and logos, including Intuitive, da Vinci, and Ion, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intuitive Surgical, Inc. or one of its subsidiaries or of their respective owners. Additional information about our trademarks can be found on our website at www.intuitive.com/trademarks. Although we reference our trademarks located on our website, this list of trademarks and any other materials on our corporate website are not incorporated by reference into this Form 10-K or any of our other filings under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Exchange Act. Company Background As part of Intuitive’s mission, we believe that minimally invasive care is life-enhancing care. By combining ingenuity and intelligent technology, we expand the potential of physicians to heal without constraints. We envision a future of care that is less invasive and profoundly better, where diseases are identified early and treated quickly so patients can get back to what matters most. Since our founding over 30 years ago, we have been delivering on this mission and vision by combining innovative technology with clinical expertise to advance minimally invasive care. We do so by providing a comprehensive ecosystem that includes robotic-assisted systems, instruments and accessories, customer learning, and customer support services all connected by a digital portfolio that enables actionable insights across the care continuum. Among other capabilities, these products and services can augment the skills and improve the efficiency of clinicians and care teams while providing decision support and learning that can help deliver differentiated clinical and economic value for patients, providers, and payers when compared to the next best available treatment options. To assure continued alignment with the patients and healthcare community we serve, we have adopted the Quintuple Aim as our “north star.” Starting with a focus on patients, we seek to demonstrate that our products can deliver better outcomes that are validated by rigorous, independent, and peer-reviewed evidence. Second, we aim to create better patient experiences that enable patients to get back to what matters most in their lives more quickly, with fewer complications, less pain and discomfort, and greater predictability. Third, we aim to enable the care teams who use our platforms and technology-enabled ecosystem to have better experiences that augment their skills while reducing fatigue and increasing efficiency and reliability. Fourth, we aim to help lower the total cost of care per patient episode when compared with existing treatment alternatives, providing a return on investment for hospitals and healthcare systems and value for payers. Lastly, we aim to expand access to high-quality minimally invasive care by working together with hospitals, healthcare systems, patient advocacy groups, and other stakeholders to address barriers to care. While surgery and acute interventions have improved significantly in the past few decades, there remains a significant need for improvement across all aspects of the Quintuple Aim. Healthcare payers and providers continue to expect better clinical outcomes and decreased variability of outcomes across clinicians and care teams. Globally, some healthcare systems continue to be stressed and lacking in critical resources, including the professionals who staff care teams. At the same time, healthcare providers, payers, and governments strain to cover the healthcare needs of their populations and demand lower total cost per patient to treat disease. In the face of these challenges, we believe that we are well-positioned to synthesize scientific and technological advances in biology, computing, imaging, algorithms, and robotics to deliver meaningful and measurable value to all of our stakeholders. Products Systems Our robotic-assisted platforms extend the care teams’ capabilities to deliver minimally invasive care. These platforms include da Vinci surgical systems, which are designed to enable a wide range of surgical procedures across a broad patient population using a minimally invasive approach, and the Ion endoluminal system, which extends our commercial offerings beyond surgery into diagnostic procedures, enabling minimally invasive biopsies in the lung.…