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A common budget category for hospitals, surgical centers, and outpatient care facilities is capital equipment. Capital equipment purchases can cover a broad range of machines. For example, capital equipment can include imaging systems, such as digital X-ray, mammography, MRI from industry leaders including GE, Siemens, and Hologic. Hospitals may upgrade or expand their cancer treatment capabilities with linear accelerators and radiosurgery systems, such as those offered by Varian, Elekta, and Accuray. Healthcare systems may also budget to acquire cardiac mapping systems from innovators such as Abbott, Boston Scientific, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic. More recently, a growing area of capital equipment investments are for surgical robotics that support a range of service lines and procedures. Leaders in the surgical robotics space include Intuitive, Auris (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), Stryker Mako, and Zimmer Rosa, to name a few.
Medical capital equipment sales such as these can total in the hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars. Your prospects, however, probably define capital equipment more broadly than just the most expensive systems it uses for patient care. UCLA Health, for example, defines capital equipment as standalone assets that cost $5,000 or more and have a useful life of a year or longer. Given this definition, some may categorize capital equipment to also include software and equipment that adds value or extends the life of an existing system, regardless of cost.
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One of the biggest challenges your MedTech sales team will face is selling to hospitals, and the right approach to hospital sales prospecting is critical to success. Selling technology and services to hospitals take industry knowledge, technical expertise, and a clear value proposition. Knowing how to make the best use of time, especially early in the sales cycle, is an equally important, if not essential skill. The worst-case scenario is investing hours into preparation and sales meetings with a prospect only to discover there is no potential for a sale.
The data on physician retention is a cause for concern for everyone in the healthcare industry. In 2018, the hospital turnover rate for all job descriptions was 19.1 percent, the highest of the decade. Moreover, on average since 2014, hospitals turned over 87 percent of staff. According to the 2019 National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, although 8.13 percent of hospitals view retention as a strategic imperative, only 43.2 percent have a formal retention strategy, and 27.4 percent say a formal strategy is “under consideration.”
The costs associated with turnover alone should warrant more urgency. The time and resources required for recruiting, screening, hiring, onboarding, and training new employees, along with the potentially negative cultural impact and lost productivity resulting from staff changes could total millions of dollars per year for a large health system.
Dialysis is a lifesaving treatment for people with kidney failure. According to The Kidney Project at the University of California San Francisco, about 750,000 people in the U.S. and 2 million worldwide are diagnosed with end stage renal disease (ESRD). The only treatment option for these patients besides kidney transplant is dialysis.
Recent innovations have made dialysis safer and more effective — and less disruptive to patients’ lives. These eight examples demonstrate how the Medtech industry is giving physicians and their patients with kidney failure new options.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that six in 10 adults in the U.S. have a chronic health condition, and four in 10 have two or more. Furthermore, common chronic health conditions are leading causes of death and disability and represent the lion’s share of health care costs in the country. The CDC estimates that 90 percent of the U.S.’ $3.3 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures stem from treatment of chronic health conditions.
There are numerous chronic health conditions that can require long-term care. Some examples of chronic health conditions follow — along with some of the Medtech systems that provide treatment options, help manage conditions, and improve the quality of life for patients.
Gene therapy is bringing renewed hope to patients with diseases like cancer, neurodegenerative conditions, and other ailments. It’s advancing quite nicely since the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act with both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) making significant progress in the science of gene therapy.
So how is gene therapy evolving the world of healthcare? Let’s explore the science.
Electronic medical records (EMR)—also referred to as electronic health records (EHR)—were designed to make healthcare records and systems easier for patients, providers, hospitals and databases. The technology is an obvious advantage for a lot of reasons: paper documents take up valuable office space, can easily be stolen or lost, and also are vulnerable to water damage, fires and even poor penmanship.
However, the transition to a paperless EHR system has proved cumbersome and at times presented a greater security risk than the old-fashioned way. Are EHRs simply a replacement of paper or is there more potential to the underlying data sets and workflows enabled by these tools?
The Sunshine Act, aka Open Payments, requires transparency into the financial relationships between physicians and medical device, supply, biologic, and pharmaceutical companies. Although the compliance burden related to Open Payments can be substantial for your organization, you may discover that you can offset this to some degree. Your sales team can use the data, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes on its Open Payments website, to understand prospects better and, perhaps, improve sales conversion rates.
Applications of 3D printing in healthcare hold incredible potential for the future. Many experts are predicting that 2019 will be a game-changing year as advances in AI and other technology could allow 3D printing to surpass human capability alone. Designs would no longer be restricted to human intelligence and experience.
"Generative design is the ultimate thinking outside the box,” writes Avi Reichental in Forbes, “In this case, the box of the human mind. The paradigm allows for faster morphing and optimizing, which can save money, increase scalability and raise efficiency while consuming less energy and enhancing both form and function.”
Medical public awareness campaigns are designed to distribute important healthcare messages to large populations. With over seven billion people in the world, it is necessary to find ways to share information ethically, without bias and injustice to others. Public healthcare awareness is critical to everyone as disease and infection can inflict anyone, at any time. As such, it is important to spread healthcare messaging through verbal, written, and visual means that can be understood by everyone, promote social health, and are not discriminatory in nature.
Robotic surgery is not a new topic in the medical field; however, it is expanding in ways that warrant a closer look. Innovations around surgical robots are beginning to provide value in reducing overall healthcare costs, while providing greater access of care to remote or mobile-limited patients. In fact, over one third of all hospitals in the United States house at least one surgical robot.
Intuitive’s da Vinci line of surgical robots is known as a market leader and has held the industry standard for many years. However, last year, some of their patents began expiring. The field of surgical robotic innovation, competition, and the overall drive for market share is growing and there are some new players that should be on your radar in 2019.
Welcome back to Conversations With Carevoyance, a series dedicated to highlighting healthcare and MedTech vendors, thought leaders, and innovators across the healthcare industry. Today, we’re chatting with Lisa Bichsel, owner of Bichsel Medical Marketing Group.
Founded in 2014, Bichsel Medical Marketing Group or BMMG builds and executes marketing strategies for medical device and biotech companies. Most of their clients are startups, so Bichsel and her team help them with scalable marketing, advertising, PR, and other critical aspects of commercialization as they work toward their exit strategy.
Territory Manager is Carevoyance’s newest product offering, a recently launched tool designed specifically for MedTech sales teams, explicitly focused on improving workflows and addressing the needs of representatives that sell to doctors and hospitals.
Territory Manager complements Carevoyance’s Omniscience, an existing platform that enables precise user-driven analyses into healthcare markets. This new tool harnesses a host of healthcare data and makes it functional, simple, and accessible, delivering substantial value to the entire sales team at all stages of the process.
Time waits for no one and the American healthcare system does not seem to be making it a priority. Despite the fact that the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, it can still be difficult to see a doctor in a timely manner, especially if you are trying to get an appointment with a specialist or live outside of a major metro area.
Healthcare systems around the world (including universal healthcare systems) don’t have all the answers, but some countries have figured it out better than others.
According to HIPPA, 2018 was an especially bad year for healthcare data breaches. In fact, as of the end of December, the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights received over 350 notifications relating to incidents involving 500 or more healthcare records, equating to over thirteen million exposures of personal health information.
So what do you do in the event of a data breach? What is the best way to respond? How can you protect yourself from a data incident in the first place?
Having a top five health system rating in the United States is a big deal—so big that it is broken down into several categories in the IBM Watson list of top health systems. This study isolates the 15 top hospitals in the United States based on revenue-generating metrics, and their geographical locations may surprise you. These systems produce revenue of over $1.85B annually. Medium top-rated health systems generate between $800M and $1.85B per year. The smallest top five health systems produce under $800M in revenue annually.
This article will discuss the top five large health systems of 2019 and why they were nominated (sometimes year after year).
Though “doctor on call” may conjure images of a black medical bag and a knock on your door, today’s on-call doctor can mean something entirely different. Provider services are shifting from waiting for patients to arrive for care within a clinic and expanding to serve people beyond medical facilities. In an age of advancing technology, more and more patients are demanding personalized services from the comfort of their own home or on their own schedule. Choosing a provider is also more selective and personal as patient access expands. In an attempt to address a healthcare system that doesn't always serve everyone equally well, some providers are trying to bridge the gaps by offering their services via traditional house-calls and telehealth communications.
This article will focus on two on-call home services--Heal and DispatchHealth--and three on-call telehealth services--MAVEN Project, MyTelemedicine and Teladoc. How to Use an Email Template
It’s difficult still to strike the right balance when it comes to sales prospecting -- your salespeople have limited time and energy, but cold, informal, or spammy calls and emails are going to have limited returns. Especially if your market is limited, “sending more emails” isn’t always a viable option. So what can you do to make sure that your emails to physicians and hospitals are getting better returns without forcing your salespeople to meticulously craft a message for every individual contact?
That’s where templates can be useful. These allow you to personalize your message without having to start from scratch, and can help reduce the legwork for your team. None of these are replacement for research and best practices, and should be used carefully, but can greatly improve the effectiveness of your cold emails and reduce the burden on your workforce.
With the ultimate goal of transparency, the U.S. enacted the Physician Payments Sunshine Act to shed light on financial relationships between medical device, supply, biologic, and pharmaceutical manufacturers and physicians. The act, passed into law in 2010 and enforced since April 9, 2013, requires reporting on any payments to physicians or to a third-party that they request. It also requires that manufacturers report any financial interest that physicians or their family members have in their companies.
2019 is shaping up to be an incredible year in healthcare. From IT and AI innovations, to advancements in 3D printing technology, this year is also proving to be beneficial for patients dealing with everything from pain management and acute stroke intervention to immunotherapy for cancer treatment and RNA-based therapies
Behind all of these achievements are people supporting the research and its’ implementation. We often appreciate all of the medical providers that strive towards successful patient outcomes by advancing research and technology. However, we sometimes forget about the hospital CEOs that support healthcare innovations. There are several hospital CEOs that should be closely watched in 2019.
Healthcare is one of the hottest topics as presidential hopefuls gear up for the next election. Candidates vying for the Democratic nomination have introduced or thrown their support behind one of at least 10 bills outlining proposed public healthcare programs, such as new plans to provide coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace or Medicare buy-in options for people that aren’t eligible under the current program. Perhaps the most talked-about concept, however, is Medicare for All, the single-payer federal program that would replace private insurance and provide healthcare coverage to all U.S. residents.
Though healthcare can sometimes lag behind other industries in innovation, there are certainly aspects of medical technology that are moving at top speed. The headlines are full of breathless reports about advancements in healthcare that did not even seem possible a few years ago.
Healthcare trends in 2019 that are of particular interest are artificial intelligence, virtual patient services, blockchain innovations, mergers and acquisitions, and 3D printing. These technologies and innovations hone in on the patient experience by allowing medical care and prevention to be experienced individually. Affordability is at the heart of innovation too, which is why these five healthcare trends are worth a deeper review.
At the national Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference held earlier this year in Orlando, we had the opportunity to hear a presentation by two hospital executives who lead capital planning and procurement teams.
The presenters included:
Last July, we published a blog on Mapping the Medical Sales Cycle, and a key part of the medical sales process includes understanding the steps involved in hospital procurement. The end goal for selling your medical technology very likely has important implications for physician and patient satisfaction (as well as clinical outcomes). However, the new reality is that buyers of your medical technology also need to understand the financial impact.
The hospital procurement process is integral to whether a sales rep sells a product or sits on unsold inventory. By learning more about hospital procurement, the overall medical sales cycle can be navigated with significantly less friction.
Medical advancements in technology and patient care are surrounding us daily and the innovations are incredible. Every year, the Cleveland Clinic puts out a list of the top ten medical innovations to discuss their favorite advancements of the year.
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit multi-specialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation. The physicians and medical community that provide feedback regarding their top innovative choices have to follow a stringent guideline of four rules:
This article will discuss the top five Cleveland Clinic picks in detail, but will include a list of the top ten. |
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