Episode Transcript
How do I get FDA approval for a medical device? How do I get funding? How do I sell a medical device? How do I? How do I? How do I? I'm Kayleen Brown, managing editor for DeviceTalks. We are on a mission to unravel the complexities of the medical device product development cycle. In each episode, we take a deep dive into a specific stage of this journey, guided by the expertise of senior med tech leaders who have not only experienced it, but have mastered it. This is MedtechWOMEN Talks.
Welcome to MedtechWOMEN Talks, I really appreciate you spending your time with us today. We are here at DeviceTalks West October 18th and 19th at the Santa Clara Convention Center. And I'm excited to dig deep into your role and branding, PR, and so much more than that. So again, thank you for being with us today.
Thank you so much for having me.
So to start, I mean, I know you've been deep in the industry for a number of years. Can you take us back to the beginning? I mean, what was your entry point? What made you say yes, medtech?
yeah, I will. I was very fortunate that it was a role at Guidant Corporation in the year 2001. That was my first foray into the medical device industry. I had started out my career in the world of tech, and decided to pursue healthcare when that became a little bit rocky in 2000, and just fell in love with it. So I've been in medtech ever since. I was with Guidant for five years, the last year was actually part of Abbott after the acquisition, and have stayed in medtech ever since.
Did you go from - Did you stay with the acquisition?
So for one year, I did. And then I then I became a consultant to Abbott after that for the next 10 years. So my time with Abbott was pretty long at the end of the day, but it was as a consultant for the last 10 years, working mostly on the MitraClip device and with the stent business.
So how was that experience?
Fantastic. It was great. So in 2007, I decided to start consulting. I had young kids at home, and it was time to do something new. So I actually continued on as a consultant for Abbott, working on their MitraClip device product and helping bring that to market and also other products, such as their stent division. And at the same time was beginning to work with a lot of startups in the industry as well. So mostly Silicon Valley-based companies and some of the companies that I worked with during that time went on to become very, very successful medtech companies. Many are still around today: Nevro, Shockwave, Intersect ENT, NeoTract. And now, you know some of those companies still remain clients today. But that was a decade of consulting that I was fortunate enough to work with many great med tech companies.
One big hit after another and it continues as I understand it. Congratulations on all your success.
Thank you.
I have to wonder, I mean, you moved from kind of a full-time employee into consultancy and freelancing. I mean, how was that transition?
Yes It was wonderful. It gave me a lot of flexibility. I think, you know, the invention of the BlackBerry and the iPhone were great for me because I was able to continue to be very responsive and connected to all of my clients, but have a little bit more freedom to be with my kids when I needed to be. So initially it was part-time and then as I got busier, it became definitely a full-time job until it was more than a full-time job as I grew along with my clients. So many of those companies started out just like some of our clients today, just startups needing help with establishing their initial brand. Maybe they came to me when they had a Series A financing or we're starting to think about a product product launch. And then, of course, as they become more and more successful, there's more and more opportunity, more things to do. So. I eventually started the agency in 2017.
Great. Well, I mean, that builds beautiful context for a broader question. So take away your title and your great company and just kind of focus on your role. Can you explain your role in the broader perspective of the medical device product cycle?
Yeah, definitely. So the role that I serve today is, as you know, running my small agency, is very focused on medical devices. But in a broader sense, really what we do is we help establish brands when we help launch companies and launch products in healthcare. So that can be everything from supporting clinical trial enrollment to product launches. You know, educating patients about new technologies through all different types of tactics and strategies. So definitely Media Relations is core to what we do. But even before starting, you know, telling the story to the media, it's about developing a message and a brand and a presence in the market. So that's the role that we serve within the medical device product lifecycle.
So I typically ask where does your role fit within the lifecycle, to try to really understand at what point other stakeholders would be communicating with you. But from what you're saying, it sounds like you start at the beginning, and you're sort of at every stage of product development all the way through commercialization.
Yeah. Often it is from the very beginning and we love to work with startups, that's something unique, I think, for us that we have created our business model to accommodate the needs of startups. So we work with them, you know, as they need us, we're available to them and really try to become an extension of their marketing team. Often, our clients in the early days are the CEO or founder. And that's a lot of fun, we love helping entrepreneurs bring their innovations to market. And then as they grow, we might start working with the head of marketing. And then for bigger companies, possibly the head of corporate communications or investor relations, as they become more established. So we've been able to scale and grow alongside our clients, which is a lot of fun, because we truly do feel that were a part of their extended team.
I mean, this industry so familial, you'll hear me say that over and over and over again, because I believe that once you're in it, it's impossible to leave. Shared passion and what we get to do for a living is just such a privilege.
That's fantastic.
So talking kind of about reputation-building and branding, and media relations. You know, I'm surprised to hear that you work with startup companies. From my experience, I don't feel like they - in general, in very general - realize the importance of building your brand before you really have something to start showing to the financial community and, you know, other stakeholders in the product development cycle. So how important is starting to build your brand and your reputation at that early stage?
I think it's critical. I mean, really, it starts whether or not you know it, it starts when you create your company. Because the minute you're talking about your company, the way you talk about it, the way your website looks, even the area code on your contact page is part of your brand. And so what we do is we help optimize and shape that and really help companies make a great first impression. It's really true there's only one chance to make a great first impression. And so that's our job to really optimize that. So you know, a pitch deck, getting that early seed financing, you have a brand when you're out there talking to investors, and I don't think it's ever too early to start thinking about it.
That really changes the way that I think about approaching the business model from ideation to commercialization. And it makes so much sense to me now that I've taken kind of a step back, as you said, there's usually only one chance, first chance, to make a first impression. So that kind of being said, I seen that you collaborate with other, I keep saying roles or stakeholders, in the medical device product cycle. So what are those roles? And like, at what point do you collaborate with them?
So we collaborate, either directly or indirectly with almost every function within an organization. So we collaborate with definitely marketing, the executives, I think, helping to translate the vision of the founder or the CEO of the company. Certainly the clinical team. It's really important for us to understand what the milestones are that are coming up. And that really comes down to the communication, but you know, even internally we can help our clients if it's a marketing contact, for example, to understand what's coming up over the course of the next six to 12 months and create a strategic plan. We have found sometimes, you know, a peer review publication pops up online, that the marketing person never knew about. The clinical person knew they were working with a physician that decided to publish, ping. But they never told the right person within marketing and so that's a missed opportunity for us. If we had just known to ask the question, what publications are on the horizon, we can create a communications plan to make sure that those are optimized as opportunities to tell the company's story. Because the news cycle is very short. And when you're communicating news, it needs to be timely, it can't be something that happened a month ago. So we do need to know in advance to the best of our ability, what is on the horizon and be able to act quickly. And we have successfully gotten, you know, great media coverage for our clients with a online publication that we were able to quickly, you know, put together announcement and reach out to media, we can do that. But it's it's always going to be better if you can plan for it. So that's just one example. But certainly regulatory, legal investor relations, all kind of come together in communications.
To your story and to your your case point, if you will, so then do you have any tips for working with the media?
Yes. I think in the early stage, well, first, I would say, step one, creating that foundational messaging. And we love to do this. There's always an existing message, probably early website, an investor pitch deck, other materials that have been developed, usually with a single audience in mind, so maybe they're, you know, focusing on clinicians or investors. What we do is come in and try to really understand the story from a broader audience perspective, how does it fit into the context of the current standard of care, positioning it against the standard of care against your competitors, and really making it impactful. And short, attention spans are short. So we want to really gain that interest from key audiences and get them to want to ask more. So we create a very strong foundational messaging platform. And that's really step one. I think that's important to do, from the very early days, so that you can be prepared. And you can also prepare third parties who might be talking about you. Maybe there's a physician presenting at a conference or doing an interview for local media, you know, at a clinical trial site, providing, you know, information for them to share. That is how you want your story to be told with the supporting evidence, very factual, not marketing language, but very fact-based. And that will really resonate with audiences, it's so important. And as objective, you know, third parties, we can we can really help with that. And it's worth just doing an audit to have, what is your social media presence? What is your digital presence? People are going to be doing research, you know. What happens if someone puts your new technology in YouTube? What will that person see whether it's a clinician or a patient? Because they will do it. And so we try to optimize that environment, to make it, you know, to really maximize every opportunity to build the brand and tell your company's story.
So you talk about video messaging on YouTube websites, or a website, presentations and industry conferences. What about press releases? So I am the managing editor for DeviceTalks, I get hundreds of press release emails a day and I find them to be very relevant. So do you have any tips? For one, do you think that they're still relevant from your perspective and to do you have any tips for writing them and using them?
Yes, press releases are relevant. They are enduring tool for communications to the media. And I do have tips for them. First of all, anything important I would put in the first half of the press release. I don't, maybe you're reading the entire press release, but.
You're honest.
You don't want people to miss like a really impactful quote because it's at the bottom of the second page. So, concise and impactful. Definitely in the first half of the press release the headlines are really important, some people will only read the headline. Really need to try to grab their attention. And we really write for the end audience of the media. So, especially if we're trying if it's something that has consumer or patient interest, so not using jargon, not using inside baseball. We use press releases as a tool. So you know, we try to reach media with news before the release crosses the wire, ideally, so that they're prepared for it. Basically our job as communicators is to make the media's job very, very easy. We want to make it so that they just think, oh, I have to cover this, this is so easy. They've given me everything, I understand it, everything I need is here, spokespeople are ready and, you know, we can easily schedule an interview. So yeah, press releases are a tool, and they are important. And I think writing for clarity and impact is very important too.
So I have a sister question to press releases. Again, I get so many press releases, press releases sent to me. And typically, if it's a very general press release, my attention span shrinks even smaller. But I find when it's really targeted to what I cover, and maybe is relevant to, again, what I cover, the topics I cover, or what I'm about to cover. Then I will make the time and the space to really look into it and look at the research and the additional documents, whether it be at a white paper or presentation. So how important is it to target the outreach, kind of as a companion to the press releases to the specific media outlets that you're targeting?
That's really important. I mean, I think that's critical, too. We do a lot of targeted media outreach, especially with the mainstream media, national media, business media, that's really to successfully obtain national media coverage from the top tier media. So Forbes, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today. It has to be very, very targeted. And I think it's important to communicate to the reporter that you understand what they cover, you know, you're specifically sending this to them. Not just that, you know, here is one of hundreds of, you know, people that you are not special. For the top tier, it's extremely important. I think for trade media, understanding generally what they cover and getting it to them in a timely manner. And making it as easy to understand as possible is really critical. We have a former Wall Street Journal reporter on our staff that we've worked with closely for years, and he has told us that as a Wall Street Journal reporter, if there was any excuse or reason not to cover a story, he wouldn't cover it. It was too complicated or technical. If it was too difficult to schedule an interview. Because there were so many things. I mean, he could cover anything. So he wasn't going to work very hard to like really pursue something if we weren't making it easy for him. So we take that to heart. And we really tried to get the media what they need, and also in a really timely manner. So for example, right now, we're working on preparing for an FDA approval for one of our clients. And this is something not all companies understand, it really takes time to get those big, deep stories. And we need patients, we need clinicians, we need to have all of our ducks in a row to be successful with that. And we can be and have been. You know, we have worked with every media outlet and we know how to work with them. But it takes time to, you know, have the right patients lined up, have those KOLs prepped, have that messaging really solid, have it reviewed by legal and regulatory. Understand that, you know, anticipate the questions that you'll get because we, as I mentioned, really invest a lot into developing a messaging platform. But there's also a Q&A, which is the kind of other side which is you know, the things you don't necessarily want to talk about either because they're not a priority or just because you hope they don't come up. They will come up. So you have to think through all of the tough questions and anticipate those and be ready to respond to them. And that's an area where if for example, we work very closely with investor relations, we need to know what analysts are hearing from the IR team, and what the what the street is saying for, especially for a company that's public, or for a company competing with a company that's public. So if you're launching a product that competes with Medtronic, or Abbott, or J&J, and potentially could take market share, those audiences are going to be interested in what you're doing, even if you're a small company, if the market is big enough.
So again, it's just kind of about that positioning and really understanding who to get in front of and when.
Yes.
Makes a lot of sense.
So reading. A lot of reading and following a lot of people on Twitter. Yes, those kinds of acts, there's constant changes.
Do you use LinkedIn or X?
Well, X is more, for me at least personally, listening. Kind of seeing what people are talking about. Almost every reporter is on it. So it's a great way to get a little bit of insight into them, what they care about, what they're talking about. LinkedIn is far and away the best way to reach you know, the audiences that medtech companies usually are interested in reaching. Investors, of course, clinicians tend to be on LinkedIn. I follow a lot of reporters on LinkedIn because, especially with the changes at X, more and more are moving to LinkedIn. So you know, that's really helpful to be able to keep track of what they're working on and the writing about.
That's a lot to balance. So you talked a lot about traditional media, are there other ways that medtech companies can tell their stories?
I think you have to tell your stories and other ways too, because traditional media will only take you so far. The media landscape has changed so much. So really, you know, any company, any person can be a publisher today. And so we we think a lot about content marketing, developing content sharing content, thought leadership, social and digital marketing. There's a lot of opportunity to tell your story through video, bylined articles, and then there are things like speaking opportunities, awards. You know, we when we develop a plan, we look at that all the milestones that are coming up for the company, sort of news, events, but also filling it in with what are the other ways we can reach those audiences with the messaging that we're developing. So we have to get a little bit creative. It's a lot. It is a lot.
So I've heard video, audio, print, in person, award recognition.
Podcasts. DeviceTalks. We love pitching Tom and DeviceTalks, of course. You do such a good job.
That's a lot. So here we've got a talking about how we are like the landscape is evolving. The media landscape is forever evolving. So that leads me to the big elephant in the room, AI machine learning. I mean, if we had this conversation a year ago, I probably wouldn't ask this question. But now I have to. So how does AI, especially Generative AI, which has, you know, really democratized AI for the mes of the world. You know, how has that changed your role and your responsibilities today? And how do you think it's going to change in the future? And you define what you mean by future, because future and AI can be a month from now, or it could be five years from now.
This is a matter of hot debates amongst marketers and advertisers, and something we're really interested in. So we actually just had internally a Generative AI training for our team, which was really excellent. And it just was scratching the surface there. I don't think anyone knows exactly how it will impact what we do today. I will say that it's something we're very interested in it, definitely can spark, you know, some creative ideas. And we have a sort of a policy that the PR Council has developed that we've adopted internally around it using ethically. I mean, there are some pitfalls, so I think it's really early days. I don't think we know yet exactly how it will impact our industry, but it is something that is really exciting. And I think hopefully it will be a force for good and make us more efficient. Which is which is you know, a good thing. But no, ask me in a year. I think it's going to, you know, really start unfolding quickly.
I promise a year from today, we will follow up on this conversation and see how your role has changed and what new tools are out there. Now that's really optimized, you know, how you do your job and help support all of the other medical device companies that you support. So, we talked a lot about branding, reputation building, connecting with traditional and alternative media. Are there any resources that our audience can go explore, to learn more to be connected to the right space.
I think, you know, really going to the heart of what we do in terms of developing a message, I think that's a really important part of what we do. And I do have a resource to recommend there, which is a book called Smart Brevity. Which was written by the founders of Axios, which a media outlet. And I have really, I think, we've always been of the mindset to sort of adopt the type of reading that they recommend to really reach audiences that are reading on an iPhone, which is the way a lot of people are consuming information today. So I think that is a book that I would recommend to people. And then also, if you're, you know, really pay attention to what is out there, how people are using social media, what is getting your attention, what reporters are covering in the news. But you do need to bring in probably an expert at the right time. To successfully build your brand and tell your story. I don't think that you necessarily have to hire someone full time or even work with an agency long term. Or it could even just be a freelancer. But I mean, if I, I'm a writer, that's what I do. But if we're developing a website, I hire a copywriter who knows how to write for websites. Like it really is worth it to hire experts to make sure you're putting your best foot forward. So I would say you do. And that's an investment. And I understand that, but I think it is worth investing. Even, you know, some companies have really unfortunate names. It's just unfortunate that they didn't hire someone to help them create a great name, because it's hard to change your name later. In some cases, there are public companies and they say, oh, gosh, this name doesn't even reflect what we do anymore. So we've helped rename companies or, you know, name products. That's important. So just being willing to bring in the best people. Just as you, you know, to be successful in anything that you do, you bring in the best people you possibly can find to help you. That's what I would recommend at the end of the day.
That's a perfect way to wrap up today's conversation, Nicole Osmer, thank you. CEO of Health+Commerce. Thank you for being with me today on MedtechWOMEN Talks. I really appreciate your time and your perspective. And I'll see you a year from today.
Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
That's a wrap. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of MedtechWOMEN Talks. Please share this episode on social media, to your co-workers, to that new hire who is overwhelmed by the nuances of medtech, and to that seasoned executive who is looking for a way to educate and inspire. Please like, follow, and subscribe to the DeviceTalks Podcast Network to never miss an episode. Our next will feature Christina Hawley, senior director of clinical operations at May Health, from the perspective of the "Clinical Gatekeeper." But before I let you go, I'd like to shout a big thank you from our figurative rooftop to our sponsors, Aptyx, Catalyze Healthcare, Confluent Medical, and Cretex Medical. It is only with their support that we've been able to create this incredible series. Want to join the best sponsors in medtech? There's still time. Connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to our DeviceTalks editorial director Tom Salemi. Once again, I'm Kayleen Brown of DeviceTalks and we'll be back soon with Christina Hawley, May Health.
