Meet Life Sciences Cloud for MedTech

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain the challenges that MedTech companies face.
  
• List the benefits of using Life Sciences Cloud for MedTech.
  
• Identify the major components of Life Sciences Cloud for MedTech companies.
  

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you complete the following.

Suggested

Complete the The Life Sciences MedTech Industry Sector module to learn about the goals, challenges, and terms of the MedTech industry.

MedTech Sales Challenges

Meet Evan Nguyen. Evan works as a sales rep at Vance Laboratories, a MedTech company. The company specializes in implanted vascular access devices used in patients with poor peripheral venous access, or who require frequent vein access for treatments like chemotherapy. Evan sells medical devices to healthcare providers and facilities, including hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and surgical centers. In his role, Evan performs the following tasks.

• Act as a liaison between Vance Laboratories and healthcare providers to ensure Vance Laboratories is fulfilling sales orders.
  
• Present Vance Laboratories products to doctors, health executives, and other medical staff.
  
• Educate physicians, surgeons, and clinical staff about product features, benefits, safety profiles, and approved medications to ensure appropriate use for patients.
  
• Bring Vance Laboratories products using his trunk stock to the provider location for each surgery or procedure.
  

Traditionally, a sales rep like Evan gets support calls for a defective product, like a faulty stent or lead. He reaches out to other reps in his territory to see if he can get the product replaced immediately. When devices malfunction, he either logs a product complaint or helps the provider with an appropriate solution. 

Evan regularly helps his customers with product cycle counting. Many of his customers rely on manual inventory tracking processes. As they count manually, there’s a high probability for errors and variations. Maintaining accurate inventory counts at multiple locations has the following challenges.

• What’s in Evan’s trunk? Inventory is kept in his car and at home. Trunk stock visibility is often inaccurate or nonexistent.
  
• What’s in the distribution center? Evan must know what he has on hand. He must also know what his colleagues have if there’s a production shortfall to ensure the right product is available at the right time.
  
• How many are in consignment? Hospital inventory counts are often managed by the customer. This requires Evan to ask his customer: “What’s the inventory count you have at the hospital?”
  

Challenges with MedTech Inventory Management

Meet Kathryn Choi, the chief medical officer at StayHealthy Hospital. One of her responsibilities is to manage appropriate surgical cardiac-device supply levels, quality, and associated costs.

Kathryn has found that medical device inventory becomes a high-cost center for the hospital. She’s looking for new inventory management strategies to reduce cost with streamlined inventory processes. She wants her hospital to proactively manage inventory levels to avoid both expiration and shortage. Here are her key focus areas.

• Push for data-driven commercial operations: As technology continues to evolve, Kathryn would like to utilize Life Sciences Cloud’s data-driven tools to improve operations, care provision, and minimize revenue leakage. Her vision is for her organization to successfully integrate and store data. This would lead to better engagement for her physicians, surgeons, and ultimately StayHealthy’s patients. Life Sciences Cloud provides them with more tailored, timely, and relevant recommendations for cost-effective and high-quality solutions. Solutions that produce the right results.
  
• Engage virtually and in person: Until recently, MedTech was an in-person industry. Now, virtual engagements between Kathryn’s hospital staff and MedTech sales reps are predominantly virtual or hybrid.
  
• Address the entire patient journey: Shift from a primarily treatment focused experience to one that’s more focused on prevention, wellness, diagnosis, and detection. This shift is indicative of a broader healthcare movement toward patient centric care across the continuum of care. The overall focus is to provide products and services that support the entire patient journey.
  
• Reduce the technology gap: Data and technology are finally starting to move from theory to practice for MedTech organizations. Yet, the entire healthcare industry continues to grapple with the practical application of data and new technologies. Leverage technology and digitization to simplify and automate. This provides the right care at the right time, and delivers the right outcome for the patient.
  

Evan and Kathryn have roles with specific challenges, and Life Sciences Cloud is here to help both of them!

Life Sciences Cloud Capabilities for MedTech Companies

Life Sciences Cloud supports MedTech companies in efficiently managing commercial processes, personalizing provider relationships, and driving connectivity across teams. Life Sciences Cloud also seamlessly connects front, middle, and back office operations. With Life Sciences Cloud, MedTech sales teams get a 360-degree view of every provider with details like affiliations, specialties, and credentials. Companies can personalize their interactions and engage more effectively with providers. 

With Life Sciences Cloud, MedTech companies benefit from:

• Enhanced sales team engagement: Centralize the right data to standardize processes, automate tasks, and surface insights on any device.
  
• Prompt and correct product delivery: Avoid an inventory stock-out, product expiration, or shortfall. Ensure patients don’t experience delays in receiving their medical device.
  
• Strategically planned insights: Align business units around a single view for real-time variance analysis of new opportunities, run-rate performance, and field inventory.
  
• Improved patient connections before and after care: Build and scale patient programs to improve patient outcomes, drive patient engagement, and reduce operational costs.
  
• Better connected assets using Internet of Things (IoT) technology: Provide medical device manufacturers and hospitals with real-time information throughout the supply chain.
  

Revenue Management with Intelligent Sales

Intelligent Sales helps MedTech companies grow revenue, achieve cost savings, and accelerate operational efficiency. MedTech sales reps use Life Sciences Cloud to manage volume, create forecasts, and define price agreements for their products. Intelligent Sales empowers sales teams with the following revenue management solutions.

• Revenue management from lead to cash: Provide MedTech companies with contracting process and revenue management solutions. When you have an opportunity in Life Sciences Cloud, sales reps can streamline and automate many historically manual processes like configuration, price, quote, contracts, and rebate management.
  
• Intelligent sales agreements and forecasting: Empower businesses and sales reps with insights into products, prices, discounts, and quantities. These insights are based on a customer contract agreeing to a price or quantity of products over a certain time. Account forecasting in Life Sciences Cloud is another tool to help sales reps get results. Forecasting provides a clear picture of new and run-rate business based on orders, opportunities, sales agreements, contracts, and custom metrics.
  

Inventory Management and Cycle Counting with Intelligent Sales

Intelligent Sales provides sales teams with cycle counting and field inventory management solutions.

Cycle Counting

Cycle counting is an important part of a MedTech company’s inventory management process. This inventory audit method helps identify and rectify discrepancies between physical inventory and system records. 

MedTech organizations serialize their inventory for high-value items by individually marking them with unique serial numbers. Implantables such as cardiac pacemakers are serialized so they can be tracked for accuracy, safety, and compliance. Life Sciences Cloud provides the following solutions.

• Setup and assign inventory cycle counting: Assign cycle counts at specific inventory locations to specific sales reps. Select products to be included in the cycle count.
  
• See real-time inventory: Gain visibility into field inventory, including consigned, product shortfall, expired product, purchased, and trunk stock.
  
• Accelerate operation efficiency: Automate flows to reduce time spent on manual processes. MedTech companies can define actions that sales reps can execute in real time for mismatches in cycle count. For example, marking missing items as lost.
  

Field Inventory Management

Field inventory management allows MedTech companies and suppliers to reduce inefficiencies in the warehouse and out in the field. Automating processes leads to full inventory visibility and greater accuracy. This helps reduce overstock and ensures all expired products are removed from hospital shelves in a timely fashion, and the right product is promptly available. 

Life Sciences Cloud provides the following solutions for better inventory management.

• Calculate shortfalls: Calculate both current and projected shortfalls accounting for inbound supply and upcoming visit demand.
  
• Implement easy ordering and order transfers: Create replenishment and transfer orders, manage approval workflows, and receive orders, including partial receipts. Life Sciences Cloud's mobile app allows for centralized management and speedy transfer between the entities, which eliminates order delays. The ability to transfer inventory between reps, doctors or hospitals in a single interface is critical, especially during a medical emergency.
  
• Start serialized inventory and cycle counting: Utilize a cycle counting system that’s easy to schedule and execute. Evan can also use barcode scanning on mobile apps to add serial numbers for order tracking. Life Sciences Cloud enables MedTech companies to maintain accurate records of products, potential hazards, adverse events, and product expiration dates. Track serialized inventory and IoT numbers to satisfy internal quality regulations and federal regulations.
  
• Manage product safety: Develop analysis and insights into products that are expiring or have been recalled. These insights enable organizations to build specific operational processes. For example, MedTech customers can build a new process for transferring out expiring products to other locations. This would reduce write-offs and expedite product recalls to improve patient safety.
  

Keep in mind, these are just examples of solutions that Life Sciences Cloud powers. There are many other ways MedTech companies take advantage of Life Sciences Cloud. Now that you know the major components of Life Sciences Cloud, let’s get more insights into the people who use Life Sciences Cloud to complete tasks.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Get Started with Life Sciences Cloud MedTech Commercial Engagement
• Salesforce Help: Intelligent Sales