Creating Great MedTech Products: Why Conventional Wisdom Doesn’t Work

Relying on conventional wisdom leads to an estimated 72% of all new products and services failing to meet expectations.

On the other hand, successful medtech companies marry – from the very beginning – a technologist working on an as-yet unproven technology with a marketing person who is testing hypotheses about unmet market needs. It is a marriage that lasts until either the product is successfully launched or the technology is dropped.

Powerful go-to-market and reimbursement strategies are two critical elements required to deliver great medtech products to the marketplace.

Go-to-market strategy: Go-to-market (GTM) plans and performance directly impact every value creation moment throughout a company’s existence – financings, strategic partnerships, mergers & acquisitions, new products in development, and existing products in the marketplace. That means GTM issues need to be top-of-mind every hour of every day. GTM is also difficult because success requires companies to simultaneously address product-centric challenges, organization-centric challenges, and marketplace-centric challenges. Tackling these three complex challenges requires the development of product-market fit, organizational fit, and business-model fit solutions, respectively.

Reimbursement strategy: Given the current healthcare environment, it is critical to articulate product value not only to clinicians but also other key stakeholders, such as payers. Reimbursement and revenue are inextricably linked; defining the clinical and economic value that a new technology has to its diverse stakeholders – i.e., clinicians, patients, payers – is essential to adoption, payer coverage and payment and ultimately revenue. Successful companies integrate their market access and reimbursement planning into the earliest phases of product development.

In this webinar, we will describe how not to be conventional by exploring the key elements of successful go-to-market and reimbursement strategies that deliver great product and company value.

Speakers

Mark Girardi, Senior Vice President, Boston Healthcare Associates

Mr. Mark Girardi has over 30 years of experience in life sciences, in vitro diagnostics, and medical devices commercialization and reimbursement. He has had roles in product management, sales and marketing, and most recently in strategy consulting.

Mr. Girardi joins us from GfK Health, a global consultancy and market research firm, where he was Senior Vice President responsible for the MedTech consulting practice. Prior to joining GfK, Mr. Girardi spent five years at Predictive Biosciences as VP of Sales and Marketing. He also served as Senior Director of Marketing at Z-Tech Medical where he was responsible for commercialization of the company’s breast cancer screening devices. As a Director of Marketing at Cytyc Corporation (now Hologic), he managed the worldwide launch of the Thin Prep Imaging System. Mark has also held senior marketing positions at Genzyme Genetics and Millipore.

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Donald B. Hawthorne, President, GTM Hawthorne

Mr. Donald Hawthorne is the President of GTM Hawthorne, a global go-to-market (GTM) consulting firm, where he helps life science companies take their products and services to market with greater speed and capital efficiency. Drawing on his C-suite experiences (CEO-5, COO-2, and CFO-3) and 36 years in the life science industry, Mr. Hawthorne brings an operating executive mindset to his GTM work and serves as a peer-level partner coach with executive teams. His novel GTM framework has an 85% GTM consulting project success rate. He delivers those outcomes by clarifying GTM issues, designing robust value propositions and business models, and enabling superior valuations and operating performance. Mr. Hawthorne earned his BS in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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