Welcome to “Insights and Ideas”
As the name suggests, our goal is to share useful learnings from 30+ years of building strategies and marketing medical products.
Those of us who have been doing this for a while have witnessed huge changes in the industry. Long gone are the days when you could launch a product, demonstrate (only) clinical value, and be reasonably assured that you could get a foothold in the marketplace.
Trends to contain costs and ensure that payers are obtaining value for new treatments have re-shaped go-to-market strategy development and planning for medical devices. These shifts in the landscape have added requirements, cost, and time to gain market access and acceptance. And all of this has occurred while competition for venture capital funds has risen from the tech industry.
Additionally, an entirely new category of medical products has arisen under the umbrella of “digital health.” These products and services include diagnostics and therapeutics. While they offer the promise of earlier intervention and better outcomes, they frequently demand significant changes in how patients are managed. They are truly disruptive technologies.
Despite these changes, the core concepts and principles to develop successful businesses remain the same. And the foundation of that success is based on delivering products and services that are proven to add customer value. Nowadays, the “customer” includes not only physicians and patients, but any market stakeholders involved in granting access, utilizing, and paying for these products and services.
So the goal of these posts will be to frame these “new-age” challenges (i.e., reimbursement, value analysis, migration to lower intensity of care settings, etc.) through the lens of timeless strategic principles to bring you tools and ways of thinking that you can apply to your business.
I look forward to the dialogue with you as well. Much of what I have learned has come from interactions with my many colleagues over the years – and this “student” knows the learning never ends!
Enjoy!
Tom