Patient Engagement for Medtech Companies is Hard: Here’s Some Advice on How to Do it Right

Engaging with patients in a genuine and transparent way is tough.  Really tough.  It’s challenging for all healthcare stakeholders – payers, providers, and industry.

From a medtech perspective, we often times get stuck in a certain mindset when trying to engage with patients. Whether it’s a continuous glucose monitor for diabetic patients or a new hip implant for orthopedic patients, we gravitate towards communicating the features and benefits of our particular product.  For example, this might sounds familiar – “Joe Patient, you should consider our knee implant because it has a greater arc than Competitor X.”

But is this really the right approach?  If our end-goal is for a patient to take action, is this the best way to engage with them?  To answer this question, I invited Neal Sofian to the program.  He’s currently the VP of Engagement & Innovation at Vivacity, a subsidiary of Premera Blue Cross.  Neal is recognized internationally for his work in population health management and behavioral change.

Interview Highlights with Neal Sofian

• What does patient personalization really mean?  And why messaging around life and context is so important.

• Why do so many life science companies fail to effectively personalize their messages to patients?

• What technologies can actually support effective patient engagement?

• Examples of companies that have been successful at patient personalization.

• How to overcome some of the legal challenges associated with patient engagement.

• The top 2 things that medtech or biotech companies should do right now to improve their patient engagement initiatives.

• Neal’s favorite non-fiction business book, the business leaders he admires the most, and the one piece of advice he’d give to his 30-yr. old self.