MedTech Go-to-Market Models Must Fit the Care Pathway

Integrated Care, Coordinated Support and Operational Efficiency are Changing What Providers Need From MedTech

Healthcare providers have faced financial constraints for years, and those pressures continue to shape how they evaluate MedTech companies. For leaders at these companies, the opportunity goes beyond just delivering the next device. The true opportunity area is investing in products, capabilities and go-to-market models that help providers lower the cost of care while improving patient outcomes.

This was the central theme in a recent panel, featuring Dr. Anne Klibanski, president and CEO of Mass General Brigham; Geoff Martha, chairman and CEO of Medtronic; and Mike Mahoney, chairman and CEO of Boston Scientific. The conversation examined how provider priorities are changing and where MedTech can strengthen its support. MedTech is uniquely positioned to support the “dual mandate” of lowering cost while improving patient outcomes. Here’s how MedTech can support that objective.

Invest in Integrated Care

Patients don’t experience healthcare as a series of independent products. Instead, they move between hospitals, outpatient facilities and their homes. This experience creates a need for greater coordination across the care pathway. Integration is also needed within the hospital as technologies and workflows become increasingly connected. Improving care integration lowers cost while improving outcomes, but we’re only scratching the surface in the US. That creates an opportunity for MedTech organizations to think more broadly about innovation and how they deploy their teams.

Technology can connect different stages of care and support increasingly complex care pathways. That includes areas such as imaging, artificial intelligence, surgical planning, intraoperative technology, robotics, navigation and outcomes tracking. The opportunity isn’t simply to improve each technology independently, but to consider how those technologies work together as part of the broader procedure and care pathway.

Therefore, integrated care creates both a product investment and a go-to-market question that MedTech leaders must be able to answer. When you have a product that supports integrated care, are your commercial teams structured and value propositions aligned to demonstrate how you’re providing greater coordination across the care pathway? The product is only step one. Companies must also reach the right provider stakeholders with the right support to achieve expected results.

Move from Point Solutions to Coordinated Support

Providers don’t simply need another representative presenting another product. They need MedTech companies to explain how their products and capabilities support the larger procedure pathway. To do this effectively, leaders must connect solutions within a company’s portfolio and understand how they work alongside other technologies already being used by the provider.

MedTech needs to change their messaging by addressing two questions. First, how should MedTech companies engage customers when their portfolios span multiple products, technologies and parts of a procedure? And how can MedTech companies demonstrate their products fit in the broader care pathway, considering products outside their portfolio? Answering both of these questions will require a broader view of customer needs, because the implications extend across Marketing, Sales and Service. Messaging should connect individual products to the broader customer problem. Customer-facing teams need enough understanding of the clinical workflow to explain where the solution contributes value and how it interacts with the surrounding technology.

While product innovation should still be a priority, the opportunity increasingly extends beyond the individual device to the entire care and procedure pathway. This will make partnership less about the number of products a company can offer and more about whether those products and the teams supporting them help solve priorities that matter to the health system.

Organize Around Healthcare Facility Operational Efficiency

Clinical outcomes remain essential, but even strong technology can face barriers if it makes clinical work more complicated.

Procedure time, staffing needs, workflow and throughput all matter. MedTech innovation that adds work for already constrained clinical teams can create another operational challenge for the customer. Technology can support provider operational efficiency by reducing operating room time, increasing procedural volume, improving throughput and streamlining administration. As a result, MedTech leaders must make improving operational efficiency the center of go-to-market strategy decisions.

MedTech teams need to understand how their products affect procedure time, staffing, throughput and workflow—then equip customer-facing teams to communicate that value. MedTech companies should also consider how they are structuring their teams to support operational efficiency: Does sales have the right balance of economic, clinical roles and service roles? Is marketing supporting operational efficiency message and providing adequate medical education?

Clinical differentiation is still an important factor, but commercial teams also need to connect that differentiation to the operational realities providers face.

Align the Go-to-Market Model to Provider Needs

All of these themes point toward one conclusion: MedTech commercial organizations need to focus on broader change to adequately support providers.

Integrated care requires companies to understand customers beyond individual products, coordinated support requires messaging and customer engagement that reflect the complete procedure pathway and operational efficiency requires teams to translate technology into outcomes that providers recognize in their daily operations.

All of those requirements can affect more than the value proposition. They can also influence which capabilities companies build, how they structure customer-facing support and where they concentrate sales, marketing and service resources.

For most MedTech organizations, the practical starting point is the care pathway.

First and foremost, map where the product sits within that pathway. Next, understand what clinicians and health systems encounter before, during and after its use. Then identify where complexity, staffing requirements or workflow challenges exist. Lastly, determine whether product investment, messaging and commercial support are aligned to those needs.

MedTech leaders don’t need to solve every challenge a provider faces, but they do need to understand the larger environment in which their technology has to deliver value. That will be the difference between being a company that just sells a basic point solution and a company that truly supports better care delivery.