This post is sponsored by IQVIA MedTech.
To achieve success in the MedTech marketplace, manufacturers have traditionally focused on product function and innovation. While not losing these goals, the paradigm is changing. Under the expanding influence of value-based care models, they must now demonstrate product value to hospitals, physician practices, patients and payers.
This sharpened focus on value — set against a backdrop of regulatory reform, industrywide consolidation and pricing pressures — is driving MedTech firms to optimize their operations and find opportunities to be more efficient, save money and gain deeper understanding from available data and outcomes.
Tapping insights from purchasers, clinicians, regulators and patients throughout the product lifecycle can inform product design, clinical trial design, manufacturing plans and market strategy, all with an eye toward demonstrating value.
As MedTech firms consider these steps toward operational excellence, many look to the advantage outside managed services partners can provide real world evidence and demonstrated value, allowing company personnel to focus on the core aspects of their business.
Demonstrating Value
Value means different things to different players across the healthcare ecosystem.
Improving patient outcomes is, naturally, the primary goal of any medical product. Both physicians and patients want comprehensive, connected systems that improve efficiency, quality, patient satisfaction or, better yet, all three. Seeking input from these groups early in development can ensure products include key features, as well as companion services like patient education tools, physician training, or interoperable data collection and reporting capabilities. These types of services can improve both device adoption and regulatory compliance.
Additionally, devices that streamline clinician workflow, facilitate participation in bundled payment models, are compatible with a range of other devices, are interoperable across networks and improve the patient experience will be attractive to physicians, who are typically the driving force behind hospital and outpatient center purchases.
Finally, MedTech that reduces overall spending on a given health condition instead of simply shifting costs will appeal to both commercial and government payers, securing reimbursement. Manufacturers can get an early handle on this by working with health insurers, health systems and hospitals while a device is still under development, offering outcomes-based or risk-sharing contracts and leveraging data on their device’s value proposition. They may also benefit from working with clinicians and payers to get devices included in bundled or episodic payment programs.
Understanding and meeting each player’s definition of value requires deep domain expertise. To survive in a value-based world, MedTech firms need insights on:
- clinical bottlenecks and surgical outcomes
- total procedure or treatment costs for specific conditions
- reimbursement options and budgets
- patient preferences
- data collection and reporting requirements
- real world evidence
- regulatory requirements in each target market.
They need the technology for real-time access to this critical information, as well as the analytic power and expertise to make sense of it. And then they need to identify the people who will influence purchasers and craft the right strategy to demonstrate product value specifically to them.
Thriving in the Value Based Care Environment
Under this new paradigm, clinical, regulatory and commercial teams must work together in an orchestrated process to maximize a product’s value to the patient, provider and payer. Data from each unit must feed into the strategies of the others to both build value into a product and successfully demonstrate that value to key players.
In addition, partnerships with outside experts with deep domain expertise can help manufacturers access more data and gain the insights they need to optimize value and deliver comprehensive solutions.
MedTech firms no longer simply sell devices. Now they sell a combination of technology and services and combination products that promise to improve healthcare and patient outcomes while lowering costs for payers. This environment, while sometimes more challenging, can also bring higher rewards, both in terms of patient outcomes and satisfaction and in gaining a stronger reputation and foothold in a value-driven marketplace.
IQVIA MedTech solutions and services help medical device and diagnostics companies to innovate with confidence, maximize opportunities, and, ultimately, drive human health outcomes safely forward. Learn more at www.iqviamedtech.com.