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Health Technology, Medical Devices

Article | November 2, 2022

Creative thinking explores the wonder world of creation. Creative thinking edit challenges and insert solutions. Thinking is not narrow minded; it is a brood minded side effect. Are you standing still , holding the sign detour? Detour signal and message “ you cannot go pass here.” This message is like concrete to narrow minded thinking.Brood minded thinking says it is another way, I will find it , dismissing blind spots.. Napeleon Hill stressed the importance of ones’ thoughts in his Book Think and Grown Rich. Yes, the drum beat rymthe of the mind is thinking and manifesting an outcome. Napeleon Hill message is to sweep yourself to success, lean on the Bibical scripture” As you think so shall you be” As you think so shall you be amplfies the constant and significant need for growth and expanding. An interesting simple guarantee; a burning desire and an idea survives on the basis of thought, of will, of consistency and of determination. Contary to desire is force of giving up. The giving up force is similar to a ballon that’s blown up , being popped or untied , spilling and releasing out the air that blew it up. While the barriers of thought can spout limits; heels of success potential are unlimited. Thinking holds and embrace hands with the imagination, knowledge, visions,dreams, goals, wisdom,implementing a plan and an understanding. Consideration must ahere to a pattern of habit conditioning to implement and discover the enlightment engraved in devolping and being mindful of ones’thoughts. Goals- action based ( preferably written instuctions for best results) providing guidance for a desired outcome. The necleus for goals achievement is : confidence, commitment, clarity, creavity and consistency. Determination, desire and discipline are unstoppable buddies who see each other everyday.This is goal code. Imagination- imagination confess it is a continious activity seeking expression and is a storage center with creative wonders and unlimited possibilities. Dream- Dreams are a reflection of a desire begging to be recognize and fillful its purpose. Knowledge- Learning acquired through process of exposure,training ,education , reading, research or experiment Vision: reflection or an image created by words. Vision boards are useful and should be accompanied by words to assist in creating a vision. For instance, hearding the words pinkchair will flash an image of a pink chair to your thoughts of a pink chair. Plan- Plan is a diligent fan of goals. Plan provides instructional and clarity on a proposal; action to be taken and potential of its being productive, profitable and feasible. A plan is mission related, written and allow simple,easy and effective and steps for implementing What are the influencers and principles that are weaved into creavtive thinking? Thinking habits- how you see,explain and intrepret Environment- exposure ,travel, and surrounding Adversity- solution and problem solving based Altitude- level of understanding Knowledge- Learning structure Experience- practical knowledge gained Personal Development- promotion of ones’ learning and a concentrated effort to be informed Do not clog the drain. Thoughts are useful things. Thoughts can nudge you to be creative. Remember information is abundant and thoughts have power to create. “You can be what you want to be, do what you want to do, have what you want to have” Rev. Ike. This idea is associate with creative thinking. Creative thinking is an affirmation for success. It is also stated “ change your thoughts, change your life” Wayne Dyer Think, speak and affirm is a side effect lingering in creative thinking.Creative thinking is the drum beat of the mind. As it is said, Give the drummer some!”So I will so I can” is a mind with thoughts and thinking that erase impossibe. Think About This- Be creative Wear shoes that fit Do not hurt your feet With sores of regret Wounds of doubt And blisters of neglect

Health Technology, Medical Devices

Article | May 22, 2023

Contents 1. Alexa, Are You There? 2. Digital Assistants-Cum-Doctor-Assistants 3. Toward An AI-Friendly Life! 1. Alexa, Are You There? If Siri, Alexa, Google Now, or Cortana are your friends, you do not need any special introduction for today’s topic! This is because these digital assistants have become part and parcel of our lives; from completing our minimal tasks to helping us solve our problems, they make our day-to-day life simpler and more manageable. Popularly called AI, Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines. Similarly, Machine Learning, also called ML, is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. 2. Digital Assistants-cum-Doctor Assistants The unpredictable pandemic years, which took thousands of lives, depict the rise of complexities in the healthcare industry. To deal with such cases in the future tactfully, the healthcare segment needs to be proactive and implement advanced technologies to detect, resolve, and prevent untimely death. Modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning help the medical fraternity perform tasks usually done by humans quickly and accurately, saving much time that can be utilized elsewhere. Let’s take a quick tour of how AI and ML can boost the healthcare industry: Artificial Intelligence can broadly scan patient databases or consult patients via a chatbot or online support system to understand their symptoms, send data to doctors, and get real-time diagnoses and prescribed medicines. Machine Learning, a subset of AI, can replace traditional processes with a supervised one, as in, a patient can be treated based on similar symptoms and treatment of other patients. The process requires a quick scanning of the database, which can be time-consuming if done by human effort. Taking technology by storm, patients suffering from neurological disorders can be treated via Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) backed by AI. With the help of this technology, normal bodily functions, such as the ability to move, speak or react, can be restored. It can also assist doctors in treating patients with strokes, locked-in syndrome, etc.The healthcare segment is revolutionizing, as sensitive operations such as heart surgery are being performed with robotic precision and control with AI-based algorithms. For this purpose, precision machine learning processes are being used to train robots and improve accuracy. AI can also help in digital pathology. Instead of placing separate slides or tissue blocks and observing them manually, pathologists can do it via AI, which can help analyze digital slides using image analysis and machine learning. 3. Toward an AI-friendly Life! If you never forget to wear a smartwatch, track daily steps, get water intake notifications, eat mindfully, and consistently monitor pulse rates, then you are already AI-friendly! You have successfully incorporated AI into your life and taken the first step towarda healthy life!

Healthtech Security

Article | August 31, 2023

A digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system. The implementation of a digital twin is a model that mirrors a unique physical object, process, organization, person or other abstraction. For healthcare providers, digital twins provide an abstraction of the healthcare ecosystem’s component characteristics and behaviors. These are used in combination with other real-time health system (RTHS) capabilities to provide real-time monitoring, process simulation for efficiency improvements, population health and long-term, cross-functional statistical analyses. Digital twins have the potential to transform and accelerate decision making, reduce clinical risk, improve operational efficiencies and lower cost of care, resulting in better competitive advantage for HDOs. However, digital twins will only be as valuable as the quality of the data utilized to create them. The digital twin of a real-world entity is a method to create relevance for descriptive data about its modeled entity. How that digital twin is built and used can lead to better-informed care pathways and organizational decisions, but it can also lead clinicians and executives down a path of frustration if they get the source data wrong. The underlying systems that gather and process data are key to the success for digital twin creation. Get those systems right and digital twins can accelerate care delivery and operational efficiencies. Twins in Healthcare Delivery The fact is that HDOs have been using digital twins for years. Although rudimentary in function, digital representations of patients, workflow processes and hospital operations have already been applied by caregivers and administrators across the HDO. For example, a physician uses a digital medical record to develop a treatment plan for a patient. The information in the medical record (a rudimentary digital twin) along with the physician’s experience, training and education combine to provide a diagnostic or treatment plan. Any gaps in information must be compensated through additional data gathering, trial-and-error treatments, intuitive leaps informed through experience or simply guessing. The CIO’s task now is to remove as many of those gaps as possible using available technology to give the physician the greatest opportunity to return their patients to wellness in the most efficient possible manner. Today, one way to close those gaps is to create the technology-based mechanisms to collect accurate data for the various decision contexts within the HDO. These contexts are numerous and include decisioning perspectives for every functional unit within the enterprise. The more accurate the data collected on a specific topic, the higher the value of the downstream digital twin to each decision maker (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Digital Twins Are Only as Good as Their Data Source HDO CIOs and other leaders that base decisions on poor-quality digital twins increase organizational risk and potential patient care risk. Alternatively, high-quality digital twins will accelerate digital business and patient care effectiveness by providing decision makers the best information in the correct context, in the right moment and at the right place — hallmarks of the RTHS. Benefits and Uses Digital Twin Types in Healthcare Delivery Current practices for digital twins take two basic forms: discrete digital twins and composite digital twins. Discrete digital twins are the type that most people think about when approaching the topic. These digital twins are one-dimensional, created from a single set or source of data. An MRI study of a lung, for example, is used to create a digital representation of a patient that can be used by trained analytics processes to detect the subtle image variations that indicate a cancerous tumor. The model of the patient’s lung is a discrete digital twin. There are numerous other examples of discrete digital twins across healthcare delivery, each example tied to data collection technologies for specific clinical diagnostic purposes. Some of these data sources include vitals monitors, imaging technologies for specific conditions, sensors for electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG). All these technologies deliver discrete data describing one (or very few) aspects of a patient’s condition. Situational awareness is at the heart of HDO digital twins. They are the culmination of information gathered from IoT and other sources to create an informed, accurate digital model of the real-world healthcare organization. Situational awareness is the engine behind various “hospital of the future,” “digital hospital” and “smart patient room” initiatives. It is at the core of the RTHS. Digital twins, when applied through the RTHS, positively impact these organizational areas (with associated technology examples — the technologies all use one or more types of digital twins to fulfill their capability): Care delivery: Clinical communication and collaboration Next-generation nurse call Alarms and notifications Crisis/emergency management Patient engagement: Experiential wayfinding Integrated patient room Risks Digital Twin Usability Digital twin risk is tied directly to usability. Digital twin usability is another way of looking at the issue created by poor data quality or low data point counts used to create the twins. Decision making is a process that is reliant on inputs from relevant information sources combined with education, experience, risk assessment, defined requirements, criteria and opportunities to reach a plausible conclusion. There is a boundary or threshold that must be reached for each of these inputs before a person or system can derive a decision. When digital twins are used for one or many of these sources, the ability to cross these decision thresholds to create reasonable and actionable conclusions is tied to the accuracy of the twins (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Digital Twin Usability Thresholds For example, the amount of information about a patient room required to decide if the space is too hot or cold is low (due to a single temperature reading from a wall-mounted thermostat). In addition, the accuracy or quality of that data can be low (that is, a few degrees off) and still be effective for deciding to raise or lower the room temperature. To decide if the chiller on the roof of that patient wing needs to be replaced, the decision maker needs much more information. That data may represent all thermostat readings in the wing over a long period of time with some level of verification on temperature accuracy. The data may also include energy load information over the same period consumed by the associated chiller. If viewed in terms of a digital twin, the complexity level and accuracy level of the source data must pass an accuracy threshold that allows users to form accurate decisions. There are multiple thresholds for each digital twin — based on twin quality — whether that twin is a patient, a revenue cycle workflow or hospital wing. These thresholds create a limit of decision impact; the lower the twin quality the less important the available decision for the real-world entity the twin represents. Trusting Digital Twins for HDOs The concept of a limit of detail required to make certain decisions raises certain questions. First, “how does a decision maker know they have enough detail in their digital twin to take action based on what the model is describing about its real-world counterpart?” The answer lies in measurement and monitoring of specific aspects of a digital twin, whether it be a discrete twin, composite twin or organization twin. Users must understand the inputs required for decisions and where twins will provide one or more of the components of that input. They need to examine the required decision criteria in order to reach the appropriate level of expected outcome from the decision itself. These feed into the measurements that users will have to monitor for each twin. These criteria will be unique to each twin. Composite twins will have unique measurements that may be independent from the underlying discrete twin measurement. The monitoring of these key twin characteristics must be as current as the target twin’s data flow or update process. Digital twins that are updated once can have a single measurement to gauge its appropriateness for decisioning. A twin that is updated every second based on event stream data must be measured continuously. This trap is the same for all digital twins regardless of context. The difference is in the potential impact. A facilities decision that leads to cooler-than-desired temperatures in the hallways pales in comparison to a faulty clinical diagnosis that leads to unnecessary testing or negative patient outcomes. All it takes is a single instance of a digital twin used beyond its means with negative results for trust to disappear — erasing the significant investments in time and effort it took to create the twin. That is why it is imperative that twins be considered a technology product that requires constant process improvement. From the IoT edge where data is collected to the data ingestion and analytics processes that consume and mold the data to the digital twin creation routines, all must be under continuous pressure for improvement. Recommendations Include a Concise Digital Twin Vision Within the HDO Digital Transformation Strategy Digital twins are one of the foundational constructs supporting digital transformation efforts by HDO CIOs. They are digital representations of the real-world entities targeted by organizations that benefit from the advances and efficiencies technologies bring to healthcare delivery. Those technology advances and efficiencies will only be delivered successfully if the underlying data and associated digital twins have the appropriate level of precision to sustain the transformation initiatives. To ensure this attention to digital twin worthiness, it is imperative that HDO CIOs include a digital twin vision as part of their organization’s digital transformation strategy. Binding the two within the strategy will reinforce the important role digital twins play in achieving the desired outcomes with all participating stakeholders. Building new capabilities — APIs, artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technologies enable the connections and automation that the platform provides. Leveraging existing systems — Legacy systems that an HDO already owns can be adapted and connected to form part of its digital platform. Applying the platform to the industry — Digital platforms must support specific use cases, and those use cases will reflect the needs of patients, employees and other consumers. Create a Digital Twin Pilot Program Like other advanced technology ideas, a digital twin program is best started as a simple project that can act as a starting point for maturity over time. Begin this by selecting a simple model of a patient, a department or other entity tied to a specific desired business or clinical outcome. The goal is to understand the challenges your organization will face when implementing digital twins. The target for the digital twin should be discrete and easily managed. For example, a digital twin of a blood bank storage facility is a contained entity with a limited number of measurement points, such as temperature, humidity and door activity. The digital twin could be used to simulate the impact of door open time on temperature and humidity within the storage facility. The idea is to pick a project that allows your team to concentrate on data collection and twin creation processes rather than get tied up in specific details of the modeled object. Begin by analyzing the underlying source data required to compose the digital twin, with the understanding that the usability of the twins is directly correlated to its data’s quality. Understand the full data pathway from the IoT devices through to where that data is stored. Think through the data collection type needed for the twin, is discrete data or real-time data required? How much data is needed to form the twin accurately? How accurate is the data generated by the IoT devices? Create a simulation environment to exercise the digital twin through its paces against known operational variables. The twin’s value is tied to how the underlying data represents the response of the modeled entity against external input. Keep this simple to start with — concentrate on the IT mechanisms that create and execute the twin and the simulation environment. Monitor and measure the performance of the digital twin. Use the virtuous cycle to create a constant improvement process for the sample twin. Experience gained through this simple project will create many lessons learned and best practices to follow for complex digital twins that will follow.

Article | February 18, 2021

Your sales cycle encompasses every action you take to close a new customer as a salesperson. But there is a possibility for the sales cycle to be confused with sales methodology. Sales methodology is a framework in which one practices a sales cycle. Whereas the sales cycle is the step-by-step process of you, as a salesperson, to close a deal with a client. Piper Drive, a sales CRM and pipeline management platform defines a sales cycle as the series of predictable phases required to sell a product or a service, and that sales cycles can vary greatly among organizations, products, and services, and no one sale will be the same. Especially with the healthcare industry, a thorough understanding of your health tech sales cycle will make your sales operations more efficient. Shortening the sales cycle without an up-front investment for sales is one of the critical healthcare sales and marketing goals. If you shorten your health tech sales cycle, you get more time to make additional leads. This will ultimately result in having an improved bottom line. A faster and shorter sales cycle can bring you more advantages in the competitive sales world of your industry. It will indeed allow your company to grow its business by improving market share. Have you ever thought, as a salesperson, about the effective ways to shorten the health tech sales cycle? This article mainly focuses on proactive ways to shorten your sales cycle and improve profitability. Challenges of Long B2B Health Tech Sales Cycle According to Marketing Sherpa, a market research institute, the length of the sales cycle can vary from industry to industry. Comparatively, the health tech industry has a longer sales cycle. Still, there are many effective ways to shorten it and bring a positive impact on your sales process. In general, B2B sales take a lot of time to maintain. Thus, the B2B health tech sales cycle takes even months to close a sale with a prospect and faces many challenges in the process. Some of the challenges you may face, as a health tech salesperson, can be the following on the process: Turning the Lead to a Sales-Ready Prospect No health tech salesperson will find a lead ready to make the sale without any persuasion from you. In the health tech sales cycle, lead nurturing should be your best bet to convert a prospect. With longer sales cycles, it won't be easy to nurture a lead all through the process and make a sales-ready prospect. It would be easier to convert leads when they are ready if you keep in touch with the prospects. People often find it difficult to do so in the long health tech sales cycle and end up not converting potential clients into happy customers. Maintaining Engagement Over Time The sales team keeps converting leads on their radar. As days and months pass, it is challenging to memorize each prospect you have interacted with. Neglecting them brings nothing to your business. It can be a juggle to balance new prospects with existing SQLs. Older ones may get lost in the weeds as new leads come in. No one can tell which one is a higher priority. Whom will you pay more attention to and for how long? It can be a severe obstacle in the long B2B health tech sales cycle. Keeping Your Sales Team Energized If your sales team is not engaged with the process itself and enjoys it, they will have a more challenging time dealing with leads. It is a fact that, unfortunately, salespeople can become frustrated or bored due to working with difficult and hesitant leads. As the health tech sales cycle drags on, it is tough to remain emotionally calm. If you have no strategies to energize them promptly, apathy or discouragement may come into play. Ensuring Marketing and Sales Alignment Lack of communication between the sales and healthcare marketing teams can pose the most detrimental challenges. It can impact the health tech sales cycle seriously. This loss of alignment between marketing and sales can hurt lead nurturing and lead to further difficulties like the ones listed above. When the two teams move out of sync, it often requires a lot of effort to get them on the same page again. These teams can work separately with decisions and different goals, but it would not benefit the entire company. Five Stages of the Typical Sales Cycle It is better to understand the five stages of the health tech sales cycle to comprehend how the sales cycle comes into play completely. Prospect This is the stage where the sales team attracts leads and listens to them, and learns to offer what they need. Connect This is the stage for you to get leads to move forward with your offers. You can utilize all the data you have amassed during prospecting. Research As a salesperson, this is when you learn about leads and determine whether the prospect intends to buy. Present In this stage of the health tech sales cycle, you offer your product or services as an effective solution for your lead's pain points. Close It’s a fit! By now, you know if your lead wants your product or service and move forward. Benefits of Shortening your Sales Cycle A shorter health tech sales cycle allows you to meet more prospects within the same time frame. For example, if you take one week for each prospect to complete the cycle, you can meet more people than with a two-week average life cycle for a single prospect. As you meet more people, it allows you to make more money. Moreover, most of the prospects prefer to have shorter sales cycles provided that you fulfill their need and solve their problem. However, even with a short health tech sales cycle, you should have an effective method to track sales information. Along with a short sales cycle, an effective method will increase your team’s efficiency and sales numbers. You will make more profits and improve your sales cycle. Ways to Shorten your Long Health Tech Sales Cycle One of the significant challenges faced by healthcare technology salespeople is shortening their health tech sales cycle. Unlike B2C, the B2B process of sales has to deal with many decision-makers and educate them about the value of your products. Typically, it takes a lot of time and effort to convince your prospects that your solution is customized to meet their unique needs. However, your health tech sales cycle can become agonizingly long as each prospect can have a different perspective about your solution. It can also occur due to the number of people involved in the decision-making in B2B companies. According to the latest Demand Gen Report, the buyer’s journey is getting more complicated and longer. This makes the sales process worse, which is already tedious. However, the good news is that you can follow these marketing strategies to shorten your health tech sales cycle tactically. Understand Your Buyer Personas Keep yourself away from trying to engage the wrong people. This will not bring you any results in the end. Before commencing the sales process, you should have a clear idea of who your targeted audience is. The decision-makers or influencers in the organizations you are targeting are your buyer personas. After identifying your personas, by answering the following questions, you can outline their qualities: • What are their goals? • What are their responsibilities? • What trigger drives them to buy? • What problems are they dealing with? • How do they like to research? • What inhibits a purchase? As you answer these questions, you will get a clear idea of the best way to approach them. Send an Introductory Video The prospects get to know the salesperson only in the in-person meeting. So before the in-person meeting, you can consider sending them an introduction video. This would add value and explain why you are interested in them with a ‘call-to-action. It creates familiarity by the time you connect with them. This is a very creative step to shorten your health tech sales cycle. Provide Pre-Sales Appointment Content Having a sales appointment with a prospect, who does not know anything about your solution, is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your health tech sales cycle. This means you may have to have several meetings to convince the client. This problem can be eliminated with a lead nurturing email with informative content. This email can have a link to an informative blog about your product, which was written previously. It will make them peruse your website before the actual sales meeting with you. It saves your time by eliminating many meetings to educate the prospect about your product. Provide Post-Sales Appointment Content The prospect is expected to come out with some concerns and objections after the first sales appointment. As a healthcare tech company salesperson, it is your responsibility to eliminate all those obstacles by addressing them strategically. Sending follow-up emails, videos, and case studies helps address those concerns. The content can be used to guide other prospects too. Overcoming these obstacles with effective content can shorten your health tech sales cycle effectively. Come Clean with Pricing Pricing of your products can be one of the main concerns for your prospects. Many salespeople address it only at the last stage of the health tech sales cycle. Not revealing the price at the beginning will only lengthen your process. Moreover, it may result in losing trust in you. Be transparent and reveal the price, to save yourself from such issues. Leverage Social Proof One of the smartest ways to win the trust of your prospect is to provide social proof. It will also make the deal close sooner. The best social proofs are case studies with the impact of your products or ROI. Remember to make that the company featured in the case study is similar to the particular prospect's company. In the health tech sales cycle, it is crucial to thoroughly understand the prospect. Your sales cycle should connect with the process of lead nurturing, where you act as an advisor. This will also help you build trust with the prospects and increase your chances of closing the deal before the expected time. Executing all of these alone would be challenging. At Media7, we help companies market their healthcare technology product with innovative strategies and support by implementing these strategies effectively. Our strategies help attract prospects, convert them and turn them into your happy customers forever. To know more about us, visit https://media7.com/ Frequently Asked Questions What are the stages in the health tech sales cycle? B2B health tech sales cycles include seven main stages. They are sales prospecting, making contact, qualifying the lead, nurturing the lead, making an offer, handling objections, and closing the sale. Following these steps help a salesperson to close the sale effectively. How does the health tech sales cycle help? The health tech sales cycle helps you identify potential clients and nurture them through the process of sales. It makes you effectively and efficiently guide your clients and gives them the confidence to go forward with more effort. What are the best practices for the health tech sales cycle? The best practices for the health tech sales cycle can be attracting more prospects through content marketing, building trust by understanding clients better, focusing on your customers' clients, and knowing the prospect’s organizational chart. Why is the sales cycle important in health tech? The sales cycle in the health tech industry helps the sales managers to forecast the accurate picture of your sales. This because they know where your salespersons are in the sales cycle. It also gives a clear picture of how many deals your salespeople close out of a given number of leads.