The process of commercializing a new medical device is typically quite a long one. It usually takes at least 10 years to complete the journey from conception to FDA approval, noted medtech sales veteran Jennifer Thompson during a fireside chat on Monday at Reuters’ MedTech conference in Boston.
Thompson has worked at Medtronic for nearly 20 years, currently serving as vice president of sales for the U.S. within the medical device giant’s aortic unit. When she first joined the company in 2006, most of her job entailed combing through CMS data to determine which efforts to prioritize and which populations to target.
Now, AI tools can automate much of that work, Thompson pointed out.
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She thinks technology is already helping medtech commercialization teams do a better job of tracking data. Markets, disease states and treatment options can evolve quickly — so it’s become vital to use AI to analyze these changing conditions before a commercial launch.
Each member of Medtronic’s market development team relies on AI to help them identify where eligible patients are located, as well as help physicians connect with them, Thompson stated.
This not only speeds up the commercialization process, but also improves care coordination and reduces the likelihood of patients being “lost to follow-up,” she explained.
Being able to unlock the power of patient data has also been important when it comes to uncovering bottlenecks in care, Thompson added.
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She shared an example from her work in heart failure — where patients often end up returning to the hospital repeatedly. Medtronic worked to understand where these patients were getting lost in the care pathway, and when they used AI to analyze the data, it showed that the hospitalists — the physicians managing patients during inpatient stays — were unintentionally blocking referrals to heart failure specialists or electrophysiologists who could offer device-based treatment once the patient was discharged.
“It was eye opening for a lot of us — because you always think of internal medicine, cardiologists, heart failure specialists and electrophysiologists. But a lot of people were forgetting the fact that there’s a group in between the ER and the cardiologist, and that’s the hospitalist. Knowing that data, we were able to educate the hospitalists and help them understand the role that they play in making sure that the patients don’t return back to the hospital as often as they do,” Thompson remarked.
Once this bottleneck was discovered, Medtronic focused on educating hospitalists about when and how to refer patients to ensure better continuity of care — which has helped reduce avoidable readmissions and improved patient outcomes, she said.
Medtronic also uses AI to help deploy its sales teams more strategically, Thompson added.
The company applies analytics within its Salesforce CRM system to monitor activity patterns and detect early shifts in the market. This helps Medtronic decide where to deploy or retrain its sales teams efficiently — which is important because training is a lengthy and costly process, Thompson said.
“Having the data, I can say, ‘All right, we’re starting to see trends. We’re starting to see this disease state, maybe new vascular surgeons moved into town and are actually looking for the disease state now.’ Having that data and knowing where I can deploy my people, so I have them at the right place at the right time, is essential for our success,” she declared.
As Thompson pointed out, the companies that learn to harness their data most effectively will be the ones best positioned to navigate a rapidly shifting medtech landscape.
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