With technology becoming more integral to patient care in recent years, innovation in the medtech space is progressing at an unprecedented level. From streamlining long-held manual processes to creating entirely new diagnostic devices, new tech is cropping up all over the industry—resulting in a real-world impact on patients’ quality of life.
These technologies are helping companies to enable faster and more efficient engagement with patients, improve traditional devices, incorporate more software solutions into patient care, and even launch wholly new products. Further, these modern tools help medtech companies keep up with the rapid pace of innovation, by launching new products faster and quickly extending to new markets.
Streamlining quality processes for the better
In medtech especially, quality is the name of the game. The speed at which companies can address post-market or field issues is vital to success. After all, if a product meant to improve patient care isn’t performing the way it’s intended to, there could be tangible life-saving implications.
The secret to speedy post-market action is automating and integrating what was once a manual and disparate case-to-complaint and reportability process, by using a single enterprise platform.
For instance, imagine a company that wants to decrease their issue-to-resolution times. Their cases can be automatically tied to complaints and propagate common data, enabling faster investigations, reportability determination and electronic submissions.
Also, their enterprise technology enables them to capture nonconformances with batch details which can quickly trigger ship holds, dispositions, and field actions.
And many of these major innovations trickle downstream to corrective and preventive actions (CAPA), Engineering Change Orders (ECOs), and business processes.
Having the ability to close the quality loop throughout the entire enterprise value chain can not only revolutionize a necessary process, it can deliver better patient experiences and outcomes.
Improving traditional therapies 
While headlines about new strains of Covid-19 and Monkeypox continue to circulate, the most common chronic diseases continue to grow at alarming rates.
Technology is helping to both manage difficult symptoms of these diseases, and find proactive ways to prevent them before the onset.
Advances in technology are giving patients their independence back. Think of how much easier a diabetes patient’s day-to-day life would be by conducting therapies in their own home instead of adjusting their scheduling around trips to the hospital for recurring appointments. Not to mention the lowered cost.
Imagine a world where therapies for type 2 diabetes (T2D) have the potential to prevent or even reverse its course. In the U.S. alone approximately 30 million people are diagnosed with T2D and half of them have difficulty controlling it.
Leveraging software as a medical device (SaMD)
Smart technology is virtually inescapable today. We use software devices in many aspects of our lives—in our homes, in our cars, in our pockets. And our medical needs are no exception.
Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) is one of the fastest growing areas of medtech innovation, enabling tangible life-saving results from:

Remote patient monitoring Faster, more accurate disease diagnosis and treatment decisions, such as stroke and pulmonary issues
Streamlined workflows & coordination for care teams
Digital Therapeutics and Digital Companions

…and the list is increasing exponentially. SaMD has changed how patients manage their health and interact with healthcare professionals.
Ushering in the future of care
The pace of medtech innovation is accelerating so much it almost feels as if we’ve stepped into the future. There are groundbreaking companies focused on eradicating certain cancers that are offering comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) which provides results from a simple blood draw in days. This allows oncologists to obtain information quicker and advise the right treatment to each of their cancer patients.
This is just one example of how patients at all stages of cancer can live longer and healthier through the power of blood tests and the data they unlock.
The secret weapon 
The secret weapon is the ability to connect all business processes on a single platform solution. Keeping pace with top innovators requires a modern system to manage integrated change processes and cross-functional collaboration across the entire product and software lifecycle.
The critical and complex products that patients rely upon demand responsibility to ensure the best availability, quality, outcomes and uptime.
Photo: metamorworks, Getty Images

To address challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic, state and federal governments provided temporary waivers and flexibilities to make telehealth more available for consumers. Now, Americans want the government to make these provisions permanent, a new survey shows.
The survey was published Thursday by advocacy group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). It was fielded in October by NORC at the University of Chicago and included a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults, of which 498 were commercially insured.
AHIP’s survey found that 73% of commercially-insured telehealth users think that “Congress should make permanent the provisions that allowed for coverage of telehealth services before paying their full deductible.” 
Because of these findings, “health insurance providers encourage policymakers at the federal and state levels to make telehealth design flexibilities permanent to allow for the continued convenience, access, and value they provide for Americans,” the advocacy organization stated in a news release. 
The survey also discovered:

Four in 10 of the commercially insured respondents said they had used telehealth in the last year. Of this group, more than half used telehealth between 2 to 5 times in the past year.
Nearly 70% of commercially-insured telehealth users said they used telehealth instead of in-person services in the last year because of convenience.
Almost 4 in 5 commercially-insured telehealth users said telehealth helped them receive care when they needed it.
Another 85% said there is an “adequate” number of providers available through telehealth to meet their health needs.
Women with commercial insurance were 1.6 times more likely than men to use telehealth services. Women were also four times more likely than men to use telehealth due to a lack of childcare or eldercare.
Those with low to middle incomes use telehealth slightly more than those with higher income. About 40% of those earning $30,000-60,000 annually and 46% of those earning $60,000-100,000 annually use telehealth, compared to 38% of those earning more than $100,000.

“Patients and providers accept — and often prefer — digital technologies as an essential part of healthcare delivery,” Jeanette Thornton, executive vice president of policy and strategy at AHIP, said in the news release. “Telehealth can be just as effective as in-person care for many conditions and allows patients to receive more services ‘where they are.’ That’s why health insurance providers are committed to strengthening and improving both access and use for the millions of Americans who use telehealth for their health care needs.”
Photo: Alisa Zahoruiko, Getty Images