Medtech Bits: Shifting Centers of Care, Telesurgery, Medtech Marketer Research

Hi ,

We’re getting to that time of the year when we’re all juggling vacations and time off within our companies, so I’ll get straight to the point this week. Here are the three topics that caught my eye:

Shifting Centers of Care
FDA Telesurgery Clinical Trial
Medtech Marketer Traits (Sparktoro audience research)

Shifting Centers of Care

Yes, we know ASCs are taking on more procedures and have been for a while. But Dave Carey recently posted on LinkedIn about an opportunity for medtech companies as the decentralization continues. Not only are ASCs seeing more diverse procedures but so too are physician practices.

But just because another facility can do a particular type of procedure doesn't mean that these locations can all afford to have the necessary trained staff. If insurance and patients are interested in moving away from the hospitals, how can medtech help enable that solution without increasing the burden?

And if you already have a product that is doing just that, now's a great time to be pushing that out to the world!

FDA Telesurgery Clinical Trial

Telesurgery is just a fascinating development in the world of robotic surgery and telecommunications. Connectivity, even between vast distances, is working well enough to perform a procedure in a way that the surgeon never notices a lag.

This case (ABC News report) involved a patient on the west coast of Africa and Dr. Vipul Patel, stationed at his surgical console in Orlando.

Talk about shifting the center of care! We are looking at the potential for top tier surgeons to be able to operate on patients all over the US and around the world.

According to Dr. Patel, one of the most exciting applications of this technology in the US is treating stroke and performing cardiac surgery. "We could save a huge amount of lives."

Medtech Marketer Traits

This one is just a fun one that may provide some interesting insights into yourself and/or some of your coworkers.

Sparktoro, an excellent audience research tool, recently yielded some intriguing results when I specifically searched for people who have profiles containing "medical device marketing."

Search & AI Tools Affinity

"Affinity" is essentially an indicator of which tools a particular audience will reach for, and the chart below compares how often people who had a profile with "medical device marketing" used those tools in comparison to the average person in the U.S. These tools are ranked in order of their affinity, meaning people are more likely to use Google than ChatGPT. BUT, the medical device marketer is twice as likely to use ChatGPT than the average person in the U.S.

To give an indication of those affinity numbers, the selected audience had an affinity of 98 for Google and 61 for ChatGPT. Still a big gap in the top to bottom there, but I found that audience preference to use AI tools rather intriguing.