Imagine your team has been iterating on an innovative idea for a new MedTech device. So how do you decide if commercializing that product will result in ROI for your business? Costs to develop MedTech products can be significantly higher than in other industries, which makes commercializing a new product a high-risk proposition. To ensure your team makes a smart, informed decision for your business, start by estimating the potential market opportunity.

“Market opportunity” is defined as a need or demand in a market that a company can capitalize on by introducing a new product or service. You should be able to express market opportunity in terms of numbers, not just by describing trends. For example, it’s not enough to say that a current product on the market doesn’t work well enough so surgeons will want to upgrade to the new device. Instead, you should be able to determine the size of the market in units and dollars and how much market growth (or decline) that market will experience in the next few years — which allows you to calculate the revenue you could expect to capture with your innovation.

To develop a clear picture of a new product’s potential market and calculate market opportunity, follow these four steps.

The world of healthcare was a very different place 100 years ago. Thanks to innovators who focused their talents on helping people live healthier lives and live with disabilities, the last century has seen revolutionary medical technology advances that have contributed to the quality of care and better outcomes of today. 

Here’s a look back at the medical technology advances that have taken place since the early 1900s.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) has been around since the 1970s in one form or another. In fact, RPM is one of the earliest applications of telehealth, used before that term had even been coined.

In today’s rapid shift to value-based care and reimbursement, remote patient monitoring and care management are expanding and evolving as integral elements of the fast-growing telehealth ecosystem; so rapidly, in fact, that it can be difficult to keep up with all of the new developments and innovations!

Importantly, this category of healthcare is a highly relevant illustration of how the healthcare industry in the U.S. is evolving overall.

The question of who needs to understand and prepare for what the future of remote healthcare management will look like and how it will affect them might better be phrased as, who doesn’t? Those who definitely need to stay updated and informed on these possibilities include:

• Physicians, clinical and even administrative staff 
• Patients
• Caregivers (family and non-family)
• CMS (Medicare and Medicaid) and commercial payers (health plans)
• Researchers
• Politicians
• Community leaders
• Social scientists and social workers
• Psychologists and other behavioral health providers and advocates
• Everyone working in any capacity in the medical technology industry (including marketers, salespeople, software developers, IT personnel, and many others)

Have we left anybody out? Well, include them, too. That’s how important and pervasively these technological advances will impact our society — and sooner than you may realize.

Many hospitals, healthcare systems, and other healthcare providers use group purchasing organizations (GPOs) to control costs and improve efficiency in medical supply purchases. For MedTech companies and vendors on the other side of the deal, working with a GPO can provide advantages as well. To make an informed decision about whether or not to sell through a GPO, start by learning more about these organizations, how they work, and the benefits they can offer your business.

Where will you find your next MedTech sales opportunity? Healthcare datasets can be great tools for identifying prime prospects in your market. Leveraging healthcare datasets to market your MedTech systems, however, isn’t the same as using a list of marketing leads and email addresses that you collect on your website or at an industry event. Healthcare datasets aren’t usually compiled for the purpose of marketing. Rather, they include medical data, healthcare statistics, population demographics, or insurance data that professionals, organizations, and regulatory agencies use for other purposes.

For a MedTech company, these datasets can provide information that helps you improve target marketing and focus sales efforts on physicians whose patients would benefit from your systems.  For example, healthcare datasets may include ICD-10 codes or CPT codes, which can identify physicians or healthcare facilities most likely to treat patients with certain diagnoses or to perform certain procedures.

When it comes to using healthcare datasets for sales and marketing, though, there is a definitely a right way and a wrong way to do it. Follow this list of dos and don’ts for the best outcomes.

MedTech isn’t a typical B2B industry. The systems you develop and the partnerships you form literally transform — and even save — lives. MedTech success has always required higher doses of trust, relationship building, and customer focus. Today, you have a somewhat-overlooked tool that can make achieving those objectives easier than ever before: social media.

​If you need some convincing before you can believe that social media can be effective for raising awareness about your MedTech innovations, and for growing your business, here are eight compelling reasons to consider social media for your next marketing activity. 

The MedTech solutions that your company delivers, no doubt, add significant value to the doctors and hospitals that adopt your innovations. Most medical technology or healthcare IT companies focus on enabling their clients to provide better patient care and clinical outcomes or allowing them to work with greater efficiency. Other healthcare technology companies may assist doctors, medical groups or facilities with compliance around clinical standards, security or other regulations. But has your team considered the value you could be adding by focusing on developing a broader market for your client?

If a hospital has invested millions in the latest technology or equipment, but isn’t effective in educating their community doctors and patient panels about the benefits, then will the technology reach its full potential? By raising awareness and educating patients and doctors about the benefits of your medical technology or system, you can help build and sustain your clients’ practices and, as a result, also strengthen your business and reputation as adding more value. 

​Consider how these three approaches to growing your physician referral network can help promote your MedTech solution. 

If it seems strange to think about marketing and sales organizations in the same company as “frenemies,” you probably haven’t been a part of marketing or sales teams.

There are many understandable reasons why dysfunction exists between these teams that are so dependent on each other for shared success, most notably:

• Marketing and sales personnel generally function as separate departments and silos within a business. They are not organized in a way that invites interaction and collaboration.
• Salespeople have quotas and are measured and compensated based on those metrics. 
• Marketers may be expected to produce a specific number of leads, but their compensation is not usually tied to the number of leads the marketing activities produce. Of course, sometimes the marketer’s employment status is dependent on quantifiable results. Marketers with any track record will tell you their departments and personnel are among the first to be downsized when budgets shrink.
• It’s easy to default to finger-pointing between marketing and sales teams for failures and disappointments regarding company growth targets. 

For scalable success at any company, including those within healthcare and MedTech, it’s important to keep harmony between marketing and sales teams. Here are six tips for fostering win-win relationships.