Ovarian cancer: early diagnosis is the best treatment

Health Technology

Article | September 12, 2023

Combating stress and anxiety can be a major challenge these days, but there are certain behaviors that contribute to those feelings, and you can take action right now to stop them and focus on your wellbeing. By taking a look at the way you react to others, how you practice self-care, and what kind of attitude you approach new tasks with, you can make some positive changes to your lifestyle that affect both your personal and professional lives. Stop stressing over your current job Almost everyone experiences job-related stress at some point in their lives, but when those feelings become overwhelming, it may be time to consider your options, according to Zenbusiness.com. Those in corporate positions and high-level management often cope with the most stress or anxiety due to the number of people they have working under them. If you find yourself bringing home feelings of irritability, or if you suffer from insomnia or a lack of focus during the day, take a look at open positions elsewhere and think about how much moving on could help you maintain a higher level of mental health. It can be scary to think about making such a major life change, but you’ll never know what possibilities lie out there if you don’t take a leap. Stop competing with others While some competition in the business world is a healthy motivator, other types can leave you feeling terrible about yourself. Rather than comparing your lifestyle or achievements to someone else’s, try to practice gratitude each day by using mindfulness techniques that allow you to focus on your own actions. Focus on your strengths and remind yourself that you’re doing the absolute best you can each day. Make it a point to congratulate others on their achievements, especially your coworkers, and do what you can to build others up. When it comes to social media, remember that the things we share only give a glimpse into the whole story, and that comparing your life to another’s can be detrimental to your mental wellbeing. Stop ignoring your physical needs While your mental wellbeing is obviously an important focus, it’s also crucial to think about how you can make sure your body is getting everything it needs. Working a corporate job often means sitting stationary at a desk for long hours, working through lunch hours, or working at home even after you’ve clocked out for the day. Allow yourself to rest by setting boundaries once you’re home, and give yourself the tools to get better sleep by creating an end-of-day routine that will help you relax and prepare to let the workday go. Eat plenty of lean protein and leafy greens to keep your energy up, and make it a point to get up and move around at work. You might also invest in a standing desk, as those come with multiple health advantages for individuals who spend much of the day sitting. Stop dreading the new week It can be helpful to set some boundaries where work is concerned, but it’s also important to get organized in order to banish that dread you feel on Monday morning. Facing a busy week can bring on stress and anxiety that leaves you feeling unprepared, but if you take the time to write out a to-do list on Friday, you can jump right in at the beginning of the week without feeling frazzled. It can also help to have something to look forward to, such as promising yourself a little treat once you get a certain amount of work done. Staying productive can be a big help, so if you have time left toward the end of the day and there’s a small task still to be done, don’t let your desire to leave early on a Friday afternoon take over. Finishing up can give you a sense of satisfaction and will keep you from feeling overwhelmed once the new week starts. Stop saying yes to everything Another behavior that leads to feeling overwhelmed is saying “yes” to anyone who asks for your time or energy. You may feel that doing so contributes to a helpful, team-oriented atmosphere at work, but it becomes a problem when you take on too much without focusing on your own needs at least part of the time. Learning how to diplomatically say no when you can’t take on any more responsibilities is a form of self-care that can banish stress and allow you to focus on your own needs without feeling guilty. Letting go of stress, anxiety, and poor health habits can take some time, but by creating some new routines you can learn new habits that help you tackle anything life throws your way. Write down a strategy that encompasses your daily schedule, and get organized both at work and at home for maximum mental health benefits.

Healthtech Security

Article | November 29, 2023

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.

Health Technology, Digital Healthcare

Article | September 7, 2023

COVID-19 has been a catalyst for change, with the diagnostics industry taking centre stage and rising to the challenge of a global pandemic. One of the silver linings of this mammoth task has been the unprecedented time and focus dedicated to finding new technologies and solutions within the sector. The lessons learned from the pandemic now need to be taken forward to improve breast and cervical cancer detection, prevention and treatment across the UK over the coming years. In the more immediate term, the diagnostics industry, alongside public health leaders, faces a daunting backlog as screening programmes for breast and cervical cancer were put on pause for months. These two life-saving tests have been some of the most overlooked during the pandemic and getting back on track with screening is critical as we start to turn the corner. We believe innovation in diagnostics, particularly artificial intelligence guided imaging, is a key tool to tackle delays in breast and cervical cancer diagnosis. The scale of the backlog in missed appointments is vast. In the UK, an estimated 600,000 cervical screening appointments were missed in April and May 2020. And an estimated 986,000 women missed their mammograms, of which an estimated 10,700 could be living with undiagnosed breast cancer. It is clear that hundreds of thousands of women have been affected as COVID-19 resulted in the reprioritisation of healthcare systems and resource allocation. Both cervical and breast cancer screening are well suited for digital technologies and the application of AI, given both require highly trained medical professionals to identify rare, subtle changes visually –a process that can be tedious, time-consuming and error prone. Artificial intelligence and computer vision are technologies which could help to significantly improve this. What does AI mean in this context? Before examining the three specific areas where digitisation and AI can help, it is important to define what we mean by AI. It is the application of AI to medical imaging to help accelerate detection and diagnosis. Digitisation is the vital first step in implementing an AI-driven solution – high quality images demand advanced cloud storage solutions and high resolution. The better the quality of the input, the more effectively trained an AI system will be. The first area where AI-guided imaging can play a role is workflow prioritisation. AI, along with increased screening units and mammographers, has the potential to increase breast cancer screening capacity, by removing the need for review by two radiologists. When used as part of a screening programme, AI could effectively and efficiently highlight the areas that are of particular interest for the reader, in the case of breast screening, or cytotechnologist when considering cervical screening. Based on a comparison with the average time taken to read a breast screening image, with AI 13% less time is needed to read mammogram images, improving the efficiency with which images are reviewed. This time saving could mean that radiologists could read more cases a day and potentially clear the backlog more quickly. For digital cytology for cervical cancer screening, the system is able to evaluate tens of thousands of cells from a single patient in a matter of seconds and present the most relevant diagnostic material to a trained medical professional for the final diagnosis. The job of a cytotechnologist is to build a case based on the cells they see. Utilising these tools, we are finding that cytotechnologists and pathologists are significantly increasing their efficiency without sacrificing accuracy to help alleviate the backlog of cervical screening we are seeing in many countries. Prioritising the most vulnerable patients Another key opportunity is applying AI to risk stratification, as it could help to identify women who are particularly at risk and push them further up the queue for regular screening. Conversely, it would also allow the screening interval for those women at lower risk to be extended, creating a more efficient and targeted breast screening programme. For example, women with dense breast tissue have a greater risk factor than having two immediate family members who have suffered from breast cancer. What’s more, dense breasts make it more difficult to identify cancerous cells in standard mammograms. This means that in some cases cancers will be missed, and in others, women will be unnecessarily recalled for further investigation. A simple way to ensure that those most at risk of developing breast cancer are prioritised for screening and seen more regularly would be to analyse all women on the waiting list with AI-guided breast density software. This would allow clinicians to retrospectively identify those women most at risk and move them to the top of the waiting list for mammograms. In the short term, to help tackle the screening backlog, prior mammograms of women on the waiting list could be analysed using the breast density software, so that women at highest risk could be seen first. Finding new workforce models Being able to pool resources will allow resource to be matched to demand beyond borders. Globally, more than half a million women are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year and the majority of these occur where there is a lack of guidance to conduct the screening programme. The digital transformation of cervical screening can connect populations that desperately need screening to resources where that expertise exists. For example, developing countries in Africa could collect samples from patients and image these locally, but rely on resources in the UK to support the interpretation of the images and diagnoses. Digital diagnostics brings the promise of a ‘taxi-hailing’ type model to cervical cancer screening – connecting groups with resources (drivers with cars) to those who are in need (passengers): this is an efficient way of connecting laboratory professionals to doctors and patients around the world. It’s going to take many months to get cancer screening programmes up and running at normal levels again, with continued social distancing measures and additional infection control impacting turnaround times. But diagnostic innovation is on a trajectory that we cannot ignore. It will be key to getting cancer screening programmes get back on track. AI is a fundamental piece of the innovation puzzle and we are proud to be at the forefront of AI solutions for our customers and partners.

Article | December 8, 2020

A cruelly ironic truth is that nurses and other caregivers assisting injured and ill patients often wind up injured themselves. In fact, the caregiver profession has among the highest rates of injury, with back injuries being the most common and the most debilitating. Every year, more than 10% of caregivers leave the field because of back injuries. More than half of all caregivers will experience chronic back pain. Most back injuries to caregivers happen when lifting patients from beds or wheelchairs. Injuries can occur instantly, but they can develop over time as well, often without the caregiver’s awareness. For example, the caregiver can sustain disc damage gradually and not feel any pain, and by the time he or she does experience pain, there can already be serious damage.