Today, many medical devices can be remotely monitored, thanks to embedded technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT). Some medical device manufacturers are leveraging such capabilities to enhance the efficiency of service operations. But truly forward-thinking companies are using the technology to digitally transform their entire business operations. They use the data to provide new services, incorporate information gained into the product lifecycle, and more.
To get a better understanding of digital transformation in the medical device industry, common challenges and obstacles to transforming, and potential benefits, we recently sat down with Anthony Moffa, Sr. Director, ThingWorx IIoT Platform at PTC. Here is a summary of our conversation.
What’s the role of digital transformation in the medical device industry?
RTInsights: We’ve seen how digital transformation is key to many industries. What role can it play in the medical device industry?
Moffa: It’s a continuation of something that was started about 20 years ago. The medical device industry was one of the first industries to really start embracing connected services. It started out as machine-to-machine or remote device management and eventually evolved into the Internet of Things. And the beauty of all that was, the industry had the opportunity to do the diagnostics of the equipment from a centralized location, and that obviously helps improve your service experience, customer satisfaction, all of those things. Even with all that, there’s still pressure. When I was in service, we were always asked to do more with less, for less. So, if you think about servicing organizations, they’d release a new product and sell the product. If successful, the installed base gradually grows, and grows, and grows. Yet, you don’t want to grow your service organization at the same rate, right?
And that’s one of the reasons why so many people are adopting digital. Because if you do the math, if you double your installed base, you will have to double the number of people to service that base. If your service organization says, “We want to double our service income,” you have to double the number of people because there is a direct relationship: I need so many technicians to create so much revenue. But as you become capable of integrating a digital format into your workflow, you can really start to streamline operations. Certainly, remote service helped. It made it easy to diagnose device problems. But you still had to dispatch somebody to fix things, on occasion. So now device manufacturers are starting to look at things like self-service—asking, “Could my customer fix certain things?”
That thinking spawned the role of a medical device technician, so-called med techs. And a lot of the hospitals started looking at that because they could speed up the process of medical device maintenance, and maybe do preventive maintenance and all that sort of thing. But the problem with that is, you have to train everybody on every piece of equipment. That is challenging enough, but there is also liability associated with this approach. So, this self-service model where hospital med techs do the work really hasn’t taken off as quickly as everybody would think. One thing that could help is to start doing things like augmented reality or assisted support. For example, PTC’s Vuforia Chalk enables you to do telestration—drawing a freehand sketch over a moving or still video image—with customers on-site. It is a nice addition to the digitization of service because if I’m on the phone with you, you’re explaining something, and you and I are using words, and we may not be talking about the same thing. I might be thinking you’re looking at something that you’re not. In contrast, Vuforia Chalk leverages augmented reality to enable better collaborative maintenance and product repair. It’s a more powerful FaceTime for service needs.
In addition, you can take device data obtained from remote monitoring, create an augmented experience, and overlay instructions on top of a piece of equipment for somebody to do their maintenance. Service in general has been primed for this, because of the growing install base, the complexity of the equipment, and the need for the equipment to be up and running. Like other industries undergoing a digital transformation, medical is no different in that it needs this kind of support.
What are the key technologies that enable digital transformation?
RTInsights: What are the key technologies and emerging trends that will enable the digital transformation?
Moffa: Service is finally beginning to integrate back-end systems. If you go back in time, we were all a pen-and-paper, ledger-type environment. We had siloed data. And at one point in time, somebody said, “Hey, you know what? We need to put this onto a computer because we can have access to data faster.” But when that was done, the various back-end systems, the ERP system, the MRP, and the CRM, were digitized independent of one another. And then finally, people said, “Well, we need to cross-reference this data.” That’s a big piece that’s emerging now, in that data is becoming more ubiquitous and architecting to have an open and interdependent infrastructure.
In this way, accounting has visibility into the MRP system and manufacturing, manufacturing has visibility into engineering, engineering into service, and everybody can see all of this information. So, the ability to access all this data is a huge benefit. Service technicians today have access to that data in their hand via cell phone, tablet, or both. They have instant access to people as if they were right next to them via augmented reality. They can see exactly what customers are looking at, talk to them, and provide them with instruction to do what they need to do. That is probably one of the more significant releases of technology now and that really can make a huge difference.
You’re going to see these steps, and these tiers occur, where other technologies will begin to support even more innovative approaches to service. For example, the more you start to deploy 3D CAD, and you build an efficacy within your organization to create 3D images that are explodable, where you can stretch them apart and see how they’re built, it’s amazingly intuitive and gives you the ability to show someone how to do the service work that they need to do.
What are the obstacles to digital transformation?
RTInsights: What are the obstacles to digital transformation for businesses in the remote monitoring industry?
Moffa: One thing we always talk about when deploying technology into a business is that technology is not the solution; it’s the tool. It is a means to an end, but it is not the end. You need people, processes, and policies around those components.
When it comes to people, there’s a natural pushback for change. The interesting thing about that is today you have a group of young men and women, who have grown up with a binary digitized world. They have been digitized since the beginning of their days in preschool; they’ve grown up in this world. For them, it’s less of a pushback. But you do have a different group who have never grown up with that, and they’re reluctant.
Another issue is that business itself starts to look at digitalization and associated costs. That’s going to be part of the pushback: the cost of the technology itself and the cost of changing your procedures. And then there are the policies that must wrap everything together. If you think about when we started to use email to do business, and we realized we need policies because we could expose information to people we didn’t want the information to get to.
So, you need policy to control and put guide rails around this stuff. We don’t just want to let anybody use it, at any given time, for any given purpose. You have to control that. Merging new technology into your process and establishing policies around it takes time. It takes a concerted effort. You just can’t come up with a technology, drop it in place, and run.
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