Integrated delivery networks (IDNs) offer both health care services and health insurance plans. That simple definition, however, doesn’t do justice to the impact IDN healthcare has had on the industry. When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) put more emphasis on accountable and integrated healthcare, IDNs emerged as a model to meet the challenge of providing quality care at a reasonable price. 

Although IDNs’ organizations can vary, they typically provide comprehensive healthcare services and leverage EHRs to share information about the patient with facilities and physicians and other practitioners in the network. 

IDN patients usually have access to the full spectrum of services — preventive, acute, rehabilitation, and specialized care — all from one healthcare brand. Furthermore, patients who subscribe to the IDN’s healthcare plan understand that services within the network are covered according to the terms of their plans, and there’ll be no surprises when it comes to billing. The model can also be successful at minimizing patient leakage. By providing a one-stop shop, as it were, for healthcare, satisfied patient-consumers never have to look outside the network. 
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Integrated delivery networks typically operate in specific U.S. regions. This strategy allows them to build healthcare systems that offer most services that patients need and can take advantage of close to home. 
The IDN model also creates a powerful negotiating position with Medtech companies and other suppliers. Marketing to providers who are part of an IDN typically means dealing in volume and scale. 

The story of the Theranos fraud allegations and fallout is likely to color decisions around healthcare diagnostics companies’ R&D, operations, marketing, and funding for years to come. Although Theranos shuttered in 2018, the rise and fall of this company, which claimed to have technology capable of performing hundreds of tests on only a few drops of blood, continues to capture attention, make headlines, and cause founders and investors to think twice about their decisions. 
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The cautionary tale continues as Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and president Ramesh Balwani prepare to stand trial in Aug 2020 on 11 counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. If they’re found guilty, they could be fined millions of dollars and face up to 20 years in prison. 

​Surgical robots are in high demand, which will only grow in the future. According to Markets and Markets, the surgical robotics market will grow from $3.9 billion in 2018 to $6.5 billion by 2023. These are not new machines, entirely, but their sophistication and precision has been advancing steadily for years, and the market is starting to react. So, what’s driving this growth, and what does it mean for healthcare?

​Almost every patient will, at some point, require a physician referral, typically from a primary care doctor. Much of the time, patients aren’t provided options. Referrals are made based on a number of factors, the most significant one being who is in their healthcare system. That’s not true all the time, especially in rural areas where specialists are hard to find. But how do doctor referrals work? And why does it matter to you, a supplier or provider to the healthcare industry? Let’s explore these questions.

As the world’s population continues to age, the demand for acute care hospitals will only increase. According to the latest Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare List, there are approximately 4,749 acute care hospitals in the U.S. The majority of those hospitals, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)—almost 70%--are part of a healthcare system. This trend may make these facilities an even more significant factor in how populations are treated. Their critical role isn’t expected to diminish and is part of the broader ecosystem of primary care and public health measures.

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 Dr. Dan Ladizinsky of Suturegard.

Founded in 2017, Suturegard is a medical technology solutions company with a primary product that allows surgeons to close wounds more quickly and easily with fewer sutures and in such a way that reduces or removes the need for skin grafts and reduces damage to skin.

When your Medtech company is marketing or making a sales pitch to a hospital, should you be talking to the chief administrative officer (CAO), the chief clinical officer (CCO), the chief information officer (CIO) — or all three? 
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This list of hospital executive positions and a brief explanation of the roles and responsibilities of hospital leadership can give you a better idea of who needs to know about your Medtech system or products, which relationships are worth the investment of time to build, and who needs to be at the table when it’s time for a decision. 

As a MedTech marketing or sales professional, you probably devote a great deal of your time qualifying prospects. Undoubtedly, some of the criteria you use are the size of the medical provider and adequate budget to afford your MedTech system. So, when you build your list, why not start at the top?

Here is a list of some of the largest medical providers by region in the U.S. These health systems and organizations span a broad “medical providers” definition that includes both for-profit and non-profit offering hospital, primary, and specialty care. 

​As a marketing professional, you can manage the basics, probably in your sleep. You develop ideal buyer personas, identify your target market, segment your list, and run efficiently executed campaigns. When you strategize on how to market to medical professionals, however, you need to keep additional things in mind to do your job effectively. 
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Physicians and medical professionals, more than most prospects in other vertical markets, have extremely demanding schedules, are ultra-focused on their work, and operate as part of complex organizations. They’re also inundated daily with messages, email, reports — and marketing material. Successfully learning how to market to medical professionals takes building marketing strategies that include these seven characteristics to help your campaigns rise above the noise.

​Data gives us the ability to base our decisions on facts rather than conjecture. For physicians and other healthcare practitioners, data is crucial to determining the best course of treatment and executing care plans. For hospital executives, data carries similar importance. They use data to help them make informed decisions with the financial health of their organizations hanging in the balance. 

Hospital financial metrics — essentially, key performance indicators (KPIs) for healthcare businesses — give healthcare execs much-needed visibility into their organizations, reveal areas that need improvement, and show how their organizations are performing compared to competitors or the industry as a whole. 

Medtech companies or other suppliers that track KPIs of their own may not be familiar with the industry-specific metrics that hospitals use to monitor their financial status. This list of 10 common hospital financial metrics and brief explanations of why the C-suite tracks them will give you some insight into the data that’s important to your customers and prospects. 

​Your Salesforce CRM is a vital tool for MedTech sales, when used consistently. As a healthcare CRM, Salesforce has all the features and functionality your team needs to be more effective and target better. Yet, many sales reps balk at the idea of using a CRM. They may not understand the value or believe it’s too inefficient. To get MedTech sales on board with actively using your Salesforce CRM, you may need to look at your processes and devise ways for it to be easier for them. 
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We understand the capabilities available in Salesforce and the challenges of MedTech sales, so we’ve put together five ways MedTech sales can get more of your Salesforce CRM. Let’s dive in.

​Any partner to the healthcare industry knows there are often many decision-makers in the buying process. Often one of the most pivotal roles in that of a hospital purchasing agent. This position is essential to ensuring a hospital has all the equipment, tools, parts, supplies, or services it needs to operate seamlessly and provide the best care.
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Let’s explore what a hospital purchasing agent does, their responsibilities, motivations, and how you can cultivate relationships with them.

​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.

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.
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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.