3 Lessons Learned In Optimizing Medtech Product Innovation
By Davidi Vortman, CEO, UltraSight
How do you see the future of medicine? As a leader of several successful start-up companies, I believe that, especially today, every medical technology innovator must ask themselves this question in order to develop an innovative solution that brings significant benefits to the health and lives of others. In this article, I will share my experience executing on a well-constructed vision of an innovative product by discussing three key actions that are critical to successfully going to market.
Many technological innovations are created in a research and development lab with incredibly smart engineers who think through the challenges required to actualize a vision. I believe the unique personalities of these individuals, and their broader teams, mean they have a natural inclination to see barriers as opportunities. This is essential.
However, even a vision, a top-notch development team, and the money raised to make it happen can all be for naught if you don’t take the right actions. You may create the most astounding innovation using cutting-edge technology, but it’s important to first validate the marketplace opportunity.
1. Take The Time To Research Your Market
There are innumerable examples of companies and entrepreneurs whose ideas never made it in the market because the innovation team didn’t validate whether their products significantly help healthcare professionals. In most cases, the innovation will require a change in behavior or in the common workflow; to justify that, the pain you are trying to address has to be significant and clear to the users.
Keep in mind that the importance of validating the marketplace is also relevant to a product that is further along in its maturity. An innovative company needs to determine which market segment to approach first with the earliest versions of the product; investing time in finding the path of least resistance can be a crucial step toward shortening the time to market adoption, bringing success earlier in the lifespan of the company.
Prior to UltraSight, my colleagues and I explored the concept of developing a company centered around the idea of a marketplace for family activities. Over the course of seven months, we held dozens of meetings with professionals to learn about their experiences and hashed and rehashed plans before coming to a tough realization: due to market dynamics, we would not be able to develop a sustainable and scalable business model that would justify the time and capital necessary to build this venture.
After spending so much time and effort, it is not easy to part ways from your creation. But in order to succeed, we must trust the process and the data we've gathered, and be able to let go when the math just isn't there.
2. Keep An Open Mind
Embrace your market research results even if those findings are contrary to your initial concept. A vision that goes off the rails can always be realigned on the track.
For example, as the CEO of UltraSight, an Israeli-based digital health company focused on transforming cardiac sonography through the power of machine learning, I can tell you that our first idea – to use artificial intelligence technology to facilitate fetal heart development detection – was abandoned before we even got started. This was because, at the time, there was a lack of receptivity in the marketplace.
Instead, our research pointed us in a different direction. We identified a stronger need for AI guidance in cardiac ultrasound because the heart is a moving organ located in the rib cage, making its examination difficult to master and prone to error. With this as a starting point, we still needed to dig deeper into our market research and find answers to some tough questions, such as, who would need this? How does it fit into the existing workflow? Is it supported by the current medical guidelines? Who will pay for it?
Several months later into this process, research suggested that point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) in acute care, where decisions needed to be made the fastest for critically ill patients, was where there was the most openness for adoption. This is because POCUS is an imaging modality and a risk reduction tool that is used to assess patients at their bedside. There can be huge risks associated with inexperienced users of POCUS, so after finding this out, UltraSight’s AI guidance software was created to make it possible to capture the best quality images for the most optimal view of a patient’s heart.
If we hadn’t been open to making significant changes to our initial concept in the early stages, we would never be where we are today.
3. Be Prepared For Quick Product Iterations
Naturally, entrepreneurs and tech innovators fall in love with their own creations. As a result, other people are usually better positioned to point out the flaws. You can use this dynamic to your advantage to develop the best possible product. Ask the people who are meant to use the product to test it out, then take their feedback seriously.
The process of creating product iterations results in a myriad of decisions for you and the research and development team. Some choices are more important than others but remember that each decision builds upon another to bring your vision to reality.
At UltraSight, we ran testing many afternoons where we invited volunteers to take our software for a trial run and give us feedback on the software’s user interface. Thanks to this effort, we learned what was considered intuitive and easy for our potential customers, and what was not. For example, we experimented with different user interfaces, requiring several iterative cycles until we reached a product version that worked optimally.
Exploring The Future
Innovators are natural explorers who persistently chase the next big idea. Because there will be obstacles along the way, it is important to keep in mind these three key actions to ultimately create and successfully bring your product to market.
Know the marketplace before introducing the product and keep an open mind to the insights you receive. Walk in your customers’ footsteps so you can create prototypes that will be embraced and implemented by the end user. Trust your instincts but be prepared to make changes without being discouraged.
Remember, you are developing a device for the greater good. Use all the tools at your disposal and make sure you are working with partners who share your vision.
You are, in a sense, bringing the unseen into the light of day and this is a big responsibility. Good luck on your journey, and don’t hesitate to reach out to me if I can help along the way.
About The Author:
Davidi Vortman is a tech entrepreneur and CEO of UltraSight, a digital health company focused on transforming cardiac sonography through the power of AI and machine learning. With more than 20 years of experience, Davidi has founded and grown several public and private high technology companies, and has managed ventures with consistent revenue growth. Prior to UltraSight, Davidi was founder of Lumos Global, a solar technology company providing solar energy to off-grid rural communities. Davidi also served as an executive at Comverse Technologies and NICE Systems. He holds a BSc in computer Science from the Hebrew University and an MBA from Kellogg-Recanati at Northwestern University.