COMMUNITY COLLABORA­TIONS

Medtech is a federally regulated industry, which means changes in public policy can have a profound and immediate impact on your company. We are champions of the medtech industry, advocating at the state and federal levels to ensure policies protect and support our region’s medtech sector. Our Advocacy Think Tank offers an opportunity for members with significant resources dedicated to state and federal affairs to gather for information sharing and advocacy coordination.

Industry leaders in this group help to shape the position and advocacy strategy for MassMEDIC by discussing, considering, and, if necessary, reaching consensus on action plans for pressing federal policy issues. Activities include developing comments for federal rulemaking (e.g. FDA’s Device Remanufacturing Guidance), and legislative discussion drafts (e.g. Senate HELP Committee PREVENT Pandemics Act) and providing guidance in regard to supporting the organization’s sign-on to certain industry letters in collaboration, many times with fellow industry trade groups.

The medical device industry has an opportunity to enhance the patient experience and drive better outcomes through increased adoption of patient-centric approaches. By giving patients a voice throughout the development lifecycle and pairing those insights with a solid understanding of all stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem, the industry can broaden their scope from enabling the proper usage of a device to generating evidence of the device’s positive impact.

Unlike the pharmaceutical industry, which has made strides in patient engagement, there is no broadly accepted industry standard framework to support medical device organizations in gathering and leveraging patient insights during development.

We have partnered with Alira Health to open a think tank of medical device leaders and patient associations with a common goal: to develop a framework around patient engagement practices.

This group explores questions and develops protocols around current issues, including:

• How should the patient engagement function be implemented at medical device companies?
• What verticals can be most enhanced through greater patient engagement?
• How can the industry leverage existing patient data from their devices?
• When should patient engagement practices begin, at what key points in development should it be included, and when should key stakeholders, including regulatory authorities and payers, be engaged?
• How does patient engagement relate to reputation management and community engagement, particularly regarding social media management?

Our objective is to outline a standardized process and protocols to advance the patient engagement function in the medical device space.

More than ever before, individuals are empowered to be in charge of their own health through access to their medical data, leveraging wearables, remote monitoring technology, and electronic medical records. Shifts in the landscape of primary care, driven primarily due to the global pandemic, have also brought telemedicine to the doorstep of many around the world. Partner these advances with a connected care model where digital health and AI solutions are integrated into hospitals, urgent care centers, clinician offices, pharmacies, and even the home, and it creates an exciting opportunity to elevate the way healthcare is experienced.

At the same time, many consumer brands are expanding their services in healthcare and creating new solutions to fulfill different pieces of their missions – from technological innovation to community access – while struggling to navigate a payer and provider system rooted in the past.

The goal of this working group is to bring together an exclusive group of innovators with varying perspectives to discuss the changing nature of healthcare. Centered in thought leadership, success is to identify common issues, develop relationships and decide as a group the meaningful ways to move forward.