Harnessing Cloud Technology to improve Customer Engagement for Medical Device

Aroon Krishna and David Judelson, co-founders at VirtuMed talked about the challenging environment for current medical device manufacturers and VirtuMed’s Synapse Mobile cloud based, on-demand, customer engagement platform solution to address the challenges, at a recent www.bio2devicegroup.org event.

Enumerating examples of challenges impacting medical device marketplace, Judelson, said Boston Scientific neuro modulation business has declined due to reimbursement challenges, Medtronic agreed to settle and stop the sales of pain med pump due to link with patient deaths, and big promise and subsequent failure of renal denervation solution has cut the growth among other device manufacturers.  There are challenges across the board from development to commercialization, said Judelson.  Hospitals are faring no better.  Nearly 40% of California hospitals received bad grade, constant M&A activity among hospitals, pressure from changing government initiatives, difficulties with privacy and security of EMR data has all led to medical device companies spending more money to get less and spending more in sales and marketing efforts is not the answer.

Five current headwinds are defining the existing environment.   Increased regulation and declining reimbursement from fee for service to bundling and changes in how CMS pays, is putting a lot of pressure on providers who pass the burden on to device manufacturers.  Second, there is a lot of variability in how different hospitals measure quality.  Third, aging population with increasing co-morbidities is leading to variability in clinical trials and making it challenging to assess the effects of interventions.  Four, challenges are increasing with decreasing hospital access for sales reps.  Five, huge global volatility with large swings in foreign exchange rates, government uprisings etc. is making it hard to estimate earnings.

Hospitals are often burdened with internal challenges of system integration, promise and challenges of mobile technology, problems of achieving seamless inter-operability, thinning margins, vendor management issues, physicians getting overburdened with administrative tasks, HIPPA issues and more.  All these challenges are compounded with sub par performance from medical device companies as they are delivering more failures in R&D, demonstrating lack of innovation with decreased ROI followed by decreasing investment in venture and M&A activity.

Currently, there are few solutions for comprehensive customer management, said Judelson.  Some general solutions like Salesforce, Oracle, imshealth, freshdesk, Veeva and Zendesk have been applied.  However, these require significant customization, often have complex pricing structure, are pricey for small to mid-sized enterprises, have complex IT integration and archaic mobile user interface, and are often based on limited knowledge of medical device econsyste.  There are no existing CRM solutions specially designed for medical device industry, said Judelson.

VirtuMed’s cloud based remote connectivity solution specifically fills in this gap, where device manufacturers can establish direct line with the customer, provide better, more timely customer support as a value added service, develop apps, and leverage knowledge of product users globally with access to real time outcomes data.  There are many gains from such timely information.  Research indicates that with timely physician access to post surgery recovery process and real-time conversation with patients, recovery occurs faster and patients remain more engaged in their recovery.  While there is a great deal of patient to patient interaction in social media, there are fewer tools for patient to provider engagement and that needs to change.

VirtuMed’s Synapse mobile solution helps build a connected ecosystem that combines commercial CRM, social networking, on demand communication, big data visualization, HIPPA compliant infrastructure, and enhances security with data changing hands while ensuring availability of data at the right time to the right people.  This solution aims to unite all key stakeholders on a single platform with primary objective for positive patient impact, said Krishna.  VirtuMed product is poised to offer support to companies of any size and its tech solutions can be applied at each stage in medical device life cycle, from early innovation to clinical stakeholder engagement, to customer engagement to CRM platform to enable growth in emerging markets; literally from ideation to discovery to clinical to commercialization, said Krishna.

The talk with followed with Q&A.

Johan Lodenius – Opening Keynote, “Internet of Things” at TiEcon 2015

Internet of Things is a hyped up buzz word but it is not without challenges.  First and foremost it requires innovative ways to sense and deliver information from the physical world to the cloud.  Power is also a critical element.  Many IoT applications need an ability to run for years over batteries and reduce overall energy consumption.  MediaTek is one of the largest chip-design companies providing system-on-chip solutions for the global market.    Johan Lodenius, Corporate VP and Chief Marketing Officer at MediaTek, will give an opening keynote in IoT track at TiEcon 2015.

English: Mediatek MT1389DE, a chipset for DVD player. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

MediaTek excels in achieving tight integration of components, rendering technology more efficient, enabling rich set of features, with less resources, and making it more affordable.  The company began with designing chipsets for optical drives and later expanded into chip solutions for DVD players, digital TVs, mobile phones, smart phones, tablets and so on.  In about seven years from launch, the company has gained huge market share worldwide.  In 2014, the company posted revenues of 213.1 B TWD, about USD $ 6.88 B.

The company has been known to provide extensive system engineering assistance that enables many smaller players and new entrants to enter a mobile market that has been thus far dominated by large corporations.  Looking forward to words of wisdom from Lodenius on how entrepreneurs can overcome the challenges of IoT market and better understand areas of opportunities.   Register at  https://www.123signup.com/register?id=ygszb&ref=4182698 to get a $100 discount on the two-day conference at the non-member rate.  When prompted, enter the promo code VOL500 at checkout.

Digital Health Trailblazers – event preview of upcoming EPPICGLOBAL event

US healthcare and healthcare globally,  faces some major challenges in the form of cost containment, effective coordination of care, and battling the spread of chronic diseases.  Can digital health give us leverage and tools for addressing these challenges?  At next EPPIC (www.eppicglobal.org) event, two innovative leaders in digital health, will share their perspectives.

Michelle Longmire is founder of Medable, a cloud platform that provides HIPAA compliant services to mobile and web applications.  Developers can build applications that communicate securely with Medable’s cloud platform using the Medable API.  Medable services are hosted on scalable, fault tolerant platform system.

Michelle Longmire is a physician-scientist, with a background in image analysis and processing and holds patents in machine learning as applied to medical diagnostics.  Currently she is training in dermatology at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, CA.

Anoo Nathan is Founder and CEO of Smart Montior, a device designed to provide monitoring and tracking solutions for people with chronic health conditions.  Blending sensor, mobile, and cloud technologies with big data analytics, Smart Monitor offers solutions that enhance safety and autonomy for people with chronic conditions.

Anoo Nathan is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded 2 companies, taking them from inception to profitability to exit and is an inventor on several patents.

The event will be at Lowenstein Sandler, LLP, 390 Lytton Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94301, on October 7 at 6pm.  Price for EPPIC members is $10 and for non members is $20.  Register for this event at www.eppicglobal.org.
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Also tomorrow, September 30th at 8:30 am CEO & Founder of Corvectra, Chris Melton will speak on “Rocket Science Meets Biotech at the Frontier of Digital Health” at http://www.bio2devicegroup.org event at 456 West Olive Avenue, Sunnyvale.  This is a free event.  Walk-ins welcome.

Related articles

• Medable’s mhealth platform seeks to transform app development
• Smart Monitor Named Winner of 2014 TiE50 Award

Cloud-based eClinical Systems – Myths, Challenges & Opportunities

Al Gicqueau, CEO & President at Clinovo talked about Cloud-based eClinical Systems to make clinical trial process more efficient and cost-effective, at www.bio2devicegroup.org event.

Cloud has been a big buzz word, significantly impacting the economy, in the last few years.  Cloud is growing 3X faster than traditional internet infrastructure, said Gicqueau.  Worldwide public cloud services market will total to over $73 billion, by 2017.  There is also simultaneous cloud-bashing.  According to Citrix research, majority of the Americans don’t understand it and over 51% think it has something to do with the stormy weather.  Most also believe they have never used it but over 95% of us have used cloud based services.

It is therefore important to understand what constitutes cloud based services.  There are 5 essential components of cloud based services.
Self Service, On Demand: Cloud based services are available, when the consumer needs them.  Further, for the most part  they are autonomous and the user can perform the actions without going through the IT department.  They are easy to use and on-site training will increasingly become a thing of the past.  Any training required has to be available on-line and has to be very short and for the most part the service has to be intuitive and should not require training.
Broad Network Access: Cloud based services provide a broad internet access.  For instance, consider gmail.  It can be accessed through desktop, laptop, tablet, smart phone etc.  Cloud based services enable an ability to easily synchronize information over multiple devices.
Resource Pooling: Amount of traffic over the internet is rapidly growing. Because of the distributed nature of the internet, there is no single point of measurement for total internet traffic.  But it is a fact that the total global IP traffic will pass the zettabyte threshold by the end of 2015.  By the year 2017, the total internet traffic is expected to reach 5.3 zettabytes.  To put it in perspective, if the 11 oz coffee on your desk equals one gigabyte, a zettabyte will have the same volume as the great wall of China!  Cloud based services enable customers to pool their resources and save cost.

Rapid Elasticity: In the world of internet activity there are lot of peaks and valleys.  Cloud can scale based on demand peaks, without incurring penalty for the period of low traffic.
Measured Service: Cloud offers and ability to pay as you go.  People can pay for the internet infrastructure as they pay for electricity.
Some of the examples of cloud based services include, SalesForce, Netflix, Gmail and Amazon.

Clinical Data Trends

Spiraling costs have been a grave concern in healthcare.  Typically, efficiency has not been very high in the area of healthcare. Costs of clinical trials is likely to increase even more significantly, in future, on account of increasing costs of medical research and changing and tightening regulations, among other things.  Increased costs for clinical trials will push the cost of drugs higher.  On the other hand, there is strong public criticism of higher costs of medicines and there is a lot of pressure on drug companies to contain costs.  Companies have pressure to cut the middle layers and manage clinical trials on their own.  Citing CISCRP (Center for Information & Study on Clinical Research Participation) study, Gicqueau said, currently, only 6% of clinical trials are completed on time, whereas 72% run late by over a month.

Compliance issues and regulations specified in 21 CFR, part 11, prohibit use of public cloud, for clinical data.  Clinical data has to be stored in a private cloud.  Clinovo’s ClinCapture is a cost-effective EDC (electronic data capture) system.  It is tailored to specific clinical studies teams and offers intuitive navigation and one-click access to routine functions.  It reduces time for data entry.  ClinCapture is also flexible and can be customized and deployed rapidly.  “We validate our software like medical devices are validated”, said Gicqueau.

Mobile is next major trend, as more data entries are happening through tablets and smart phones.  Tables are also very useful in remote regions of the world where cell phone reception may be spotty or non existent, where information can be easily synchronized later.  Data entries can also be structured  by getting patients involved.  Data integration is another big challenge.  Everyone hopes to make sense of the data and make meaningful use of the data.  However, making sense of the data and putting it to good use remains expensive.  Gicqueau said, meaningful data integration is another promise of the cloud.

Clinovo is launching CloudClinica, next generation, cloud-based eClinical platform.  With its easy to use, pay as you go platform, CloudClinica will eliminate IT dependency and allow small companies  to manage clinical studies in a sophisticated manner, without high level programming skills.  About 30% of cost and 60% of time associated with clinical trials is about data management, and almost 80% of clinical trials are still conducted on paper, said Gicqueau.  Paper has many pitfalls.  Paper can get lost, it is inefficient, there is challenge of mis-reading someone’s handwriting, it has regulatory risks and other hidden costs.  CloudClinica is FDA compliant and it can scale.

Clinovo had revenues of over $4 million in 2013 and raised $500,000 from business angels over the last few months to execute on their business strategy.   The company is profitable, and has 30+ clients that include Gilead, Roche and others.  Clinovo is now targeting small to mid-size companies, said Gicqueau.  Current market of $2.3 billion can be rapidly growing in the coming years.  MediData and Oracle are two dominant players but are relatively more pricey.    Clinovo’s CloudClinica will fill in the gap and broaden the use of eClinical systems and will empower and bolster the biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies, said Gicqueau.  The event was followed by Q&A.

Wish List in Open Letter to TiEcon 2012 (www.tiecon.org) Planning Committee

Dear TiEcon Organizers:

 

You have kicked off the planning for TiEcon 2012, with continuing goal to deliver the best TiEcon ever.  Successfully year after year, you have delivered a conference that is vibrant with opportunities for professionals, looking to advance their careers, staying connected with their peers, looking at staying in touch with the emerging trends, and looking for access to angels and VC community.  Year after year, you have exceeded the goal to deliver the best TiEcon, by adding new and exciting offerings, like TiE50, TiE Expo and more, by attracting the best and most sought after speakers and panels, and by keeping the enormous volunteer pool engaged, with exciting volunteering opportunities.  It is perhaps the only conference where hundreds of volunteers often spend hours toiling in the trenches, and then claim to get more out of this conference than at any other conference.

 

So what is going to be the focus this year?  Well, we have our wish list.  Readers, please leave comments about what you wish to see at this year’s TiEcon.  We hope to see more discussion on social media and where will be next disruption in social media.  Television has always been inherently social activity.  People gathered around the tube when TV was just introduced and friends still gather around the tube to enjoy sports events like Super Bowl, Academy Awards, and movies.  Will there be re-socializing television by integrating it with social media.  Is Pinterest the next big thing in social media?  Even in it’s “by invitation-only” beta phase, the company has attracted 7 million plus visitors and is driving more traffic to company websites and blogs than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn combined.  With growing cybercrime with huge and costly implications for corporations, how will we enhance network security?  Besides managing new and emerging systems, how will companies protect data and information?

 

Will TiEon focus on Energy and Life Science industries?  Despite the major Soyndra fiasco, we would like to see some discussions on solving energy challenges? Apparently, there are huge potential advantages to making cheap fuel from seaweed or macro-algae and Bio Architecture Lab inBerkeleyis currently building huge seaweed farms.  It remains to be seen how it will scale.  Will there be discussions on electric cars with durable and long lasting battery, even on harnessing solar power more effectively, and other potential breakthroughs to deal with the energy challenges.  I will absolutely love to see some serious focus on Life Science industry.  Some of the current major buzz words are the new frontiers of synthetic biology, wireless devices, and the continuing interest though not much progress in personalized medicine (with the exception of Herceptin and recent launch of Zelboraf).  Scientists will be heavily focusing on understanding the brain, and perhaps mapping the brain by zooming in on single neurons (brain has billions of them).  Understanding breakdowns within the neurons will enable targeted gene therapies, besides the current focus of personalized medicine, in oncology.

 

And finally, what new and innovative ways will the TiEcon enable entrepreneurs and other dedicated professionals to come together and leverage what each has to offer, to mutual advantage?  Each year, TiEcon has responded to the external opportunities and challenges with new offerings like extended and serious focus on Women’s Forum to encourage and ensure women professionals’ participation at TiEcon 2011, Outer Realm sessions at 2010 TiEcon, to challenge perceptual boundaries in technological, marketing, and cognitive realm and allow for cross-functional collaboration, Business Bootcamp sessions in 2009 to provide hands-on tips to the entrepreneurs, during the fledgling economy, and so on.  Now in 2012, the economy is on the path to gradual recovery but uncertainty and funding challenges linger.  We have high expectations that TiEcon 2012 will give yet again a positive boost to the professionals to follow their dreams, and offer sessions and strategies with tools and techniques, to enable them to achieve their dreams.  Readers, please leave comments about your wish list.

 

And friends, I have also heard some great info regarding best price offer for TiEcon 2012 that will be offered and will be valid only on February 21 and 22.  Stay tuned to my tweets and postings and I will share any news I get soon and don’t forget to register at http://www.tiecon.org.

GITPRO (www.gitpro.org) conference, 2012 on Emerging Technologies & Opportunities

The GITPRO conference had full attendance with almost 400 participants, including volunteers, panelists, keynotes, and sponsors.  The three tracks dedicated to technology, career and leadership, and startup boot camp were well attended and well received.  Below are some highlights from the three keynotes and then from each of the tracks.

Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur, writer, and entrepreneurship coach at Stanford, gave an excellent keynote on how to build a scalable startup whose goal is to solve for unknown customers, unknown features.  While the focus in larger companies is on execution of known business models, the startups are temporary organizations with goal to search for repeatable and scalable business model built on value proposition for the customers after acquiring thorough, deep and intimate knowledge of customers’ needs and pain points.  In his keynote, Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent Systems, shared the opportunities and business landscape inIndia. Indiais not just a consumer of science and data but is emerging as an active and viable participant and meaningful contributor in science and data and R&D.   Dr. Prasad Kaipa’s keynote was focused on how one can grow professionally to become a wise leader, not just a smart one.  With stories and examples from Mahabharata, Kaipa shared how a wise leader is called to a noble purpose, uses multiple forms of intelligence, and is not attached to a fixed point of view or ideology.

Shishu Bedi, COO of AdMaxim and David Cao, Founder & President of Great Wall Club discussed monetization of mobile apps, in the tech track.  Mobile platform has seen accelerated growth and the next revolution will be in smart TVs to reach millions of people and future technologies will dramatically change how we interact with TV, said Bedi.  The new generation of TVs will have all the applications and functionality of smart phones, tablets, and PCs and this will be the hottest space during the next few years.  It will be about who understand the user demographics and how the user interacts with TV.  Cao also believed that understanding of user behavior was important to monetization in this space.  According to Cao, although the distribution of android apps market is bigger than the iPhone apps market, monetization of android market is much more difficult because user behavior is unpredictable in the android market.

Ajit Deora Partner, LightSpeed Ventures and Shan Sinha, exCEO of DocVerse (sold to Google) discussed the basics of raising investment.  What VCs care about is getting huge multiples on their investment with least amount of risk, in the minimum time period, said Deora.  Deora went on to define that in more detail.  VCs generally expect to get 20% ownership, with 5X returns, in the minimum time period.  They like the least amount of risk, with great and team with proven track record, huge market with less to no market risk, low technology risk, scalable business model, and capital efficiency.  A huge market takes care of execution risk and though team issues can be fixed, no one can fix market challenges, so market risk is a definite no, no, said Deora.  Low tech risk means VCs like technology that is implementable and scalable.  Sinha shared his 3 basic rules for fundraising.  Rule no. 1 is about having and telling a compelling story about how entrepreneur’s product or technology will enable changing the world for better.  Rule no. 2 is having a clear understanding that investment is a tactic and not a milestone.  A milestone is growing the team or refining the product or increasing the customer base and the investment should enable the achievement of the milestone.  Before going out and asking for money, the entrepreneur must define the milestone and ask if it is a meaningful milestone that will substantially increase the value, when the milestone is achieved.  Rule no. 3 is about determining the need and raising the right amount and not too little money or too much money.

Rajesh Shetty,Mentorand Coach and Praveena Varadrajan, VP at FICO discussed essentials of managing with influence, in the leadership track.  In today’s technology age, it is not the first impression that we should focus on but the zeroth impression.  “People do their homework about you, even before you have the opportunity to meet them”, said Shetty.  Building a personal brand is not about what one says about oneself, or the extension of one’s employer’s brand, or one’s presence on the social media, or about one’s power and influence, nor is it a gift, nor is branding permanent.  In order to build your brand, said Shetty, “you must prove to the world that it is an assessment of your promise to the world and capacity to fulfill and execute it and with ongoing proof of accomplishments by people who are competent to make that assessment, typically in the field of your expertise”.  So what actions one must take to build a strong personal brand?  “Start with your strengths”, said Shetty.  The strengths that may be invisible would emerge, if one kept a journal or notes or by talking to the mentors who often have a greater insight in the mentees’ strengths.  And with all that, one must contribute meaningfully that would leave the world, a better place.  Varadrajan advised that contributing meaningfully is a precursor to managing with influence.  It is important to share the big picture and build credibility by interacting with honesty and integrity, said Varadrajan.

 

Emerging Technologies & Opportunities in Mobile, Cloud, Social Media and more will be discussed at GITPRO.org annual conference on Feb 18, 2012

What technologies will matter in 2012?  Would you like to hear from the industry veterans and successful entrepreneurs?  Where will be big growth in social media, cloud, mobile apps?  This year GITPRO conference promises to deliver all this and more.

By all indications, mobile apps will continue to grow in the coming year.  But the question remains about how to monetize it?  Will the monetization come in location based services, mobile search, money transfer apps, mobile browsing, mobile music or will be something else?  Shisu Bedi, CEO of AdMaxim will start of the Tech track with a talk on what to focus in developing and monetizing mobile apps.  Big Data is big this year and the panel on Big Data with Hadoop and NOSQL will be lead by Milin Bhandarkar, founding member of Hadoop, now at Greenplum Labs.  We are also seeing businesses building social media programs and the questions again remain regarding enthusiasm of the customers and their willingness to remain engaged.  How can companies design experiences that deliver tangible value in return for customers’ time and attention?  Jose Lazares, SVP, Marketing at thismoment and Khanderao, CTO, GloMantra will tackle these and other questions in the afternoon panel.  Anshu Sharma, VP of Force.com and Tyler Jewell, VP of Public Cloud at Orcle will discuss trends in developing with Cloud.  Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur and author of “Four Steps to the Epiphany” will deliver key note address.

Career track will tackle leadership issues, mid-career accelerators, managing effectively with influence and end with a panel discussion on preparing and negotiating in the 2012 job market.  The startup track is also exciting and veteran entrepreneurs will share lessons learned, and in different sessions, will take the attendees from startup essentials, to marketing, to raising investment.  Chet Kapoor, CEO of Apigee, who sold a company to IBM will share what he learned from launching and selling a company.  Carole Bellis from Kilpatric and Townsend and Anil Advani from InvenusLaw will cover legalities of launching a typical Silicon Valley startup, Dennis O’Malley will provide guidance on issues related to marketing and selling, and Ajit Deora and Shan Sinha will advise on how to pitch to the VCs and raising funding.

This promises to be a great conference and just the way to begin the professional journey in 2012.  Sign up at www.gitpro.org before February, 6 for discount with promocode BLOG2012 for $10 off.