As medtech companies face increasing pressure to drive product adoption, many have turned to medical teams to help bridge the gap between medical research and commercial product adoption. This more strategic role for medical teams can pose challenges as they are often siloed from commercial counterparts in data sources, communication methods, and tools.
To operate at full potential, medical and commercial teams need to be in lock-step. Dr. Martijn van Steennis, chief medical officer imaging at Philips, and Dr. Norbert Gorny, chief scientific officer at EssilorLuxottica, recently discussed their strategies to align medical insights with commercial objectives. “Medical and commercial might seem like they have competing priorities. But, those become secondary as long as you are aligned on the ultimate goal of staying patient-centric.” says Gorny.
Medtechs can bridge the gap between medical and commercial by translating medical needs into market demands and regulatory standards. This fosters open communication, data sharing, and systematic feedback loops throughout the R&D process. “R&D is the key because it’s at the intersection of almost everything – medical, marketing, operations, legal, and quality,” Gorny explains. “R&D plays a fundamental role in translating a market need into a treatment or medical device.”
For van Steennis, involving medical early in the ideation phases of a new product is key. “Sometimes, when you’re in the early stages of R&D and you want to move fast, you can forget to include medical and clinical teams. But, this can cause problems later when you’re making claims about a product and you haven’t proven them to the FDA yet,” he says. “If we can make sure that medical has a seat at the table, we can help communicate the value that the product brings to save money and speed time-to-market.”
For example, EssilorLuxottica recently redesigned their stage gate process to include medical, regulatory, and legal teams from the proof-of-concept stage up to product launch. To Gorny, “their input is absolutely vital in accelerating the innovation process.”
Ultimately, Gorny believes that ‘transparency and data sharing’ is what makes the difference in improving collaboration.
To keep data from being siloed, Gorny created a shared digital platform for ongoing insights communication that encourages rapid prototyping and early user testing with medical input. “We created incentive systems that guarantee their IP, but for the sake of our organization, they share their insights early.”
Greater alignment between medical and commercial can also set a foundation for innovative tools like real world evidence (RWE) and AI to analyze and predict market trends. “Healthcare is evolving to become more patient centric, and medical affairs can play a pivotal role,” says van Steennis. Currently, Philips uses RWE to conduct post market surveillance on claims and complaints, and van Steennis is looking to expand their usage of data and AI. “We have this new technology, and we’re testing it, but there are still so many questions. How do we get images to market faster? How do we capture feedback? How can we tap into the massive data lakes that exist out there?” he explains.
Although the future of AI and big data in medtech remains uncertain, EssilorLuxottica is already leveraging RWD to capture longitudinal insights on its products for myopia in children. “This was a new product category for us, so we needed to gather a lot of information,” Gorny remembers. “We’ve set up a global interface to interact with hospitals, prescribing ophthalmologists, and parents of these young patients to create a feedback loop of information.”
Four years later, EssilorLuxottica is reaping the benefits of this forward-thinking program. “We have a whole matrix of data for this product category that systematically feeds information to commercial, R&D, and medical teams – including things like return rates and product quality,” says Gorny. This information will feed the next generation of EssilorLuxottica products in this category, which is projected to become a much larger business in several years. “It took a lot of effort and budget allocation to make it happen, but it’s worthwhile.”
To learn more about facilitating collaboration between commercial and medical teams with a unified solution, check out the Veeva Medical Suite for medtech.