In an increasingly digital world, the amount of data generated around the use of medical devices provides opportunities for medtech companies to gain valuable insights about patients and their physicians. However, without context, those data are not sufficient to recognize what is actually happening in the market and why. To understand the environment in which these devices are functioning and provide a high-touch, personalized experience, marketers require a combination of robust external, competitive data sets in addition to their organization’s internal customer data and expert analytics. However, companies are often challenged by the scale and complexity of data aggregation and analysis needed to ascertain whether the right patients have access to the right device at the right time, identify who is likely to adopt new technologies and determine the best methods to educate and engage providers.
Do the right patients have access to the right device at the right time?
Medtech companies benefit from an understanding of where and how their technologies and competitors’ technologies are being used for specific patient populations. Data typically gathered for this purpose include procedure volumes at varying levels of granularity, which physicians and facilities are performing the procedures, and patient profiles. When these data are layered with sophisticated analysis, such as pairing ICD codes with other diagnoses and comorbidities, more detailed profiling of physicians and patients is possible, giving marketers the ability to answer questions such as the following:
- What treatment paradigms are being used today?
- How unique are those paradigms for different patient populations?
- What are the outcomes of those paradigms for each of the patient populations?
- Are there patient populations that could potentially benefit from a device/treatment being overlooked? Why?
Which factors are driving adoption of new technologies?
Medtech companies are constantly driving innovation to improve healthcare and patient quality of life, but motivating physicians to adopt technologies and change their behaviors can be challenging. This is especially true when companies lack intelligence around the facilitators and barriers to change. Gathering and analyzing data early in the device lifecycle can inform decisions around the content, format and delivery of education for both physicians and patients, including tailoring the final outreach and messaging approach based on whether the technology is disruptive, iterative or simply new to the specific physician or practice. Key questions to consider include the following:
- How does the device compare with what’s currently available or being used?
- If there is no current comparator, what clinical evidence supports its efficacy and safety?
- What impact does the device have on patient outcomes and physician practice (e.g., ease of use, reduced procedure times, cost benefits)?
- Who are the current champions of the device and what is their experience with the device?
- Do patients have opinions about device characteristics, and could those influence their choice of physician/practice?
- Are there opportunities to expand into other indications?
What are the best methods to engage and educate physicians?
Analyzing upstream referral patterns and the overall patient journey reveal opportunities for timely education to reach new physicians or better support physicians already using a device. Robust, near real-time data sources and analytics providing the following information are essential:
- The characteristics of physicians currently using the device
- How that device is being used
- The characteristics of patients being selected for procedures using the device
- The healthcare professionals referring patients
- The point in their healthcare journey at which patients are referred and selected
Real-time data provide early indications of how physicians are caring for their patients, highlighting trends that could be used to influence the referral pattern or treatment decisions.
Data paired with expert analytics are key to actionable insights.
The increasing commoditization of data in the medtech industry leaves companies with a choice of partners to augment their internal customer data with external landscape data for greater insights. However, the result, which is often generalized data and analysis (or raw data with no analysis at all), lacks the context to drive meaningful action for true market differentiation and approaches that resonate with physicians. Expert medtech industry analysts deliver accurate, nuanced analyses that tease out connections between data points, such as ICD 10 codes paired with other diagnoses and comorbidities, to understand the diagnosed populations of interest, how patients arrive at a specific treatment, and real world device use and outcomes. Representatives from large medtech companies described the importance of the right data and analysis for their market strategies in the recent webinar, “Medtech disruptors: bringing paradigm-changing technologies to market in today’s dynamic environment.”
Ultimately, with the rising amount of data available, it will become increasingly pertinent for medtech players to partner with the right data and analytics experts to draw actionable insights and tailor their business strategies accordingly.
Learn more about how Clarivate helps medtechs gain accurate, actionable insights from a combination of internal customer data, the extensive Clarivate industry data sources and nuanced analysis by Clarivate experts through the Clarivate medtech intelligence offerings.
