My interest in MedTech intersects my personal and professional life. We’ve all had that experience with the healthcare system: loved ones battling cancer or getting wheeled in for emergency surgery. We’re filled with uncertainty going into a diagnosis and uncertainty after a surgery. We place trust in the doctor, their training, and the technologies they use to heal our loved ones. Interacting with Medical Technology is a deeply personal experience. And so, by solving the business challenges MedTech companies face, we can help solve these deeply personal challenges that millions of patients face every day.
Professionally, I sought out to solve some of these challenges. First, as a medical device entrepreneur, I learned of the challenges bringing a new technology to market. MedTech innovators must navigate a changing regulatory and reimbursement landscape, implement robust quality and manufacturing processes, raise awareness and train physicians, gain market access, and manage supply chains and inventory all while innovating on technology to positively impact patients. It was no surprise that my first medical device startup, WoundStylus, failed! Afterwards, I spent nearly a decade at Bain & Company addressing these challenges from a different lens, as we helped the largest MedTech companies execute on product launches and drive new commercial strategies across thousands of sales reps.
Through these experiences, I saw how underserved MedTech innovators truly were, as legacy CRM tools and data providers repeatedly fell short. MedTech companies have been left on their own to configure and customize generic software built for other industries and use cases. Doctors are force-fit into schemas designed for other industries, like “contacts” or “accounts” or “opportunities.” Procedural data exported into spreadsheets and static reports quickly fall out of date, clouding end-to-end commercial visibility of who uses which medical devices. The shortcomings of legacy software, data, and processes compound across the industry. Doctors don't get trained on the latest medical innovations. Hospitals overpay for outdated technologies. Medical products go underutilized and inventory expires. Ultimately, we all suffer by receiving lower quality healthcare at a higher cost.
Getting patients access to new medical technologies requires engaging a complex and changing landscape of stakeholders - doctors, hospitals, IDNs, GPOs, payers, and distributors (to name a few). Selling medical devices is different than selling industrial goods, enterprise software, or even pharmaceuticals. Why are MedTech companies expected to go-to-market using tools designed for other industries? Imagine our horror if we stepped into an Operating Room and saw surgeons using hammers and screws purchased from The Home Depot? MedTech innovators deserve software as meticulously crafted as the highly specialized, life-saving medical devices they create. So, we built a platform to give MedTech innovators acuity - the ability to understand their markets easily and instantly so they can better organize commercial efforts.
The AcuityMD journey started as a Targeting platform for MedTech sales reps to automatically surface, prioritize, and act on new opportunities for the products they sell. We harnessed billions of data points like procedural volumes, shifts in where surgeons operate, and SKU-level pricing and inventory at these facilities. We then transformed these insights into an MedTech-specific data model that aligns to how the industry commercializes and ultimately drives doctors to use the latest technologies at different sites of care. Along the way, we rigorously prioritized the sales rep’s experience and designed features to help them build to quota, eliminate manual data entry, and access our platform on-the-go.
And then some interesting things started happening...the most active users of AcuityMD outperformed their peers by up to 25%, brand new MedTech reps were getting to President’s Club faster than ever before, and sales reps started using our software to prepare for job interviews. We knew we had struck a chord in MedTech when sales reps started asking their managers to buy and implement the AcuityMD Targeting platform.
As we learned more from our customers, we started to understand that AcuityMD could help connect a critical flywheel in the MedTech commercial process: how to define and prioritize opportunities to grow, measure and execute these opportunities, and learn from the outcomes to better define and prioritize for the future. For sales reps, this means a Targeting platform that gets smarter over time and can more accurately forecast to quota. As target surgeons get converted to users, contracts and pricing changes, and clinical practices evolve, AcuityMD should adapt and recommend increasingly relevant opportunities to grow the business.
The MedTech Commercial Flywheel can connect all stakeholders in the commercial organization. Upstream Marketing can better empathize with existing product users and understand whitespace clinical areas to prioritize for R&D. Downstream Marketing can gain visibility into product penetration across market segments or geographies and prioritize campaigns to support their field reps. National Accounts can determine how changes in product-level pricing can impact top-line growth forecasts and can coordinate with field reps to execute on changes in contracts. Sales Ops can gain deeper visibility into market penetration better forecast across disposable and capital products, leveraging these insights to design and align sales geographies. General Managers or Sales Leaders can ensure all commercial stakeholders have a platform to collaborate and make increasingly smarter decisions, without requiring burdensome data entry or analytics.
I could not be more excited for AcuityMD to build the MedTech Commercial Flywheel. Whether it’s enabling our customers to fight the opioid crisis or to identify opportunities to replace outdated technology, we’re excited to partner with the MedTech industry on our mission to accelerate access to cutting edge medical technology.
by Mike Monovoukas, CEO, Co-founder at AcuityMD
This post was originally posted on LinkedIn.
