​Medical expenses in the US continue to skyrocket. Findings from a recent study by the John Hopkins School of Public Health determined that the US has the highest cost of healthcare in the world. Medical spending in this country is expected to reach $6 trillion by 2027. This steady increase is becoming a considerable burden for patients and the economy. But what are the drivers of higher hospital patient costs? And are there any ways to control them?

Given the complexity of MedTech, sales teams need all the leverage they can get. You can find this with sales enablement. Healthcare sales enablement could revolutionize how you prospect. While healthcare is sometimes slower to adopt new tactics or strategies, trends show that healthcare sales enablement investment is growing. The industry, like many others, has recognized the value of sales enablement tools and how they can lead to better engagement with prospects.
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In this post, we’ll be defining sales enablement as well as providing four best practices for MedTech teams to embrace.

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.
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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.

​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.” 
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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.  
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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.