Medtronic executive: Artificial intelligence is improving device launches and patient outcomes
The process of commercializing a new medical device is often quite lengthy. The entire process from concept to FDA approval typically takes at least 10 years, medical technology sales veteran Jennifer Thompson noted during a fireside chat at the Reuters Medical Technology Conference in Boston on Monday.
Thompson has been with Medtronic for nearly 20 years and currently serves as U.S. vice president of sales for the medical device giant's aortic division. When she first joined the company in 2006, much of her job was combing through CMS data to determine which efforts to prioritize and target for which populations.
Thompson noted that AI tools can now automate much of the work.
She believes technology has helped medtech commercialization teams better track data. Markets, disease conditions, and treatment options can evolve rapidly, making it critical to use artificial intelligence to analyze these changing conditions prior to commercial launch.
Thompson said every member of Medtronic's market development team relies on AI to help them identify where eligible patients are and help doctors connect with them.
She explained that this not only speeds up the commercialization process, but also improves care coordination and reduces the likelihood of patients being “lost to follow-up.”
Thompson added that it's also important to be able to unlock the power of patient data when bottlenecks in care are identified.
She shared an example from her work in heart failure—patients often end up returning to the hospital repeatedly. Medtronic worked to understand where these patients were getting lost in their care pathways, and when they used artificial intelligence to analyze the data, the results showed that hospitalists (physicians who manage patients during their hospitalization) were inadvertently blocking referrals to heart failure specialists or electrophysiologists who could provide device-based treatments once patients were discharged.
“This is an eye-opener for a lot of us because you always think of internal medicine, cardiologists, heart failure specialists and electrophysiologists. But a lot of people forget the fact that there's a group between the emergency room and cardiologists, and that's the hospitalists. Knowing this data, we're able to educate hospitalists and help them understand the role they play in making sure patients don't come back to the hospital as often as they do,” Thompson said.
Once this bottleneck was identified, Medtronic focused on educating hospitalists on when and how to refer patients to ensure better continuity of care, which helped reduce avoidable readmissions and improve patient outcomes, she said.
Thompson added that Medtronic is also using artificial intelligence to help deploy its sales teams more strategically.
The company applies analytics in its Salesforce CRM system to monitor activity patterns and detect early changes in the market. Thompson said this helps Medtronic decide where to deploy or retrain its sales teams effectively, which is important because training is a long and expensive process.
“Having this data, I can say, 'Okay, we're starting to see trends. We're starting to see this disease state, and maybe new vascular surgeons moving into town are actually looking for this disease state now.' Having that data and knowing where I can deploy my personnel so that I deploy them in the right place at the right time is critical to our success,” she declared.
As Thompson points out, companies that learn to use data most effectively will be best equipped to navigate the rapidly changing world of medical technology.
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