Nanowear on Innovation and the Future of Field Service
Venk Varadan from Nanowear shares his thoughts on technology, innovation, customer relationships, and how these are changing field service in the medical device industry.
1. Congratulations on your recent partnership with The Secant Group! What drove this collaboration and how will Nanowear’s direction change following this announcement?
Capabilities and vision alignment between Nanowear and The Secant Group is what drove the collaboration. Nanowear has invented and developed first-of-its-kind, FDA-approved textile solutions for medical-grade diagnostic monitoring and disease management; The Secant Group is a US-based trusted market leader in biotextile solutions with decade-long customer relationships with leading medical device OEMs.
As a young company, this partnership formally derisks materials scalability not only for Nanowear’s Congestive Heart Failure product inventory needs, but also for near-term identified strategic partnerships interested in purchasing this technology at scale and under strict quality standards.
2. We understand that startups and medium-sized OEMs have a harder time establishing and growing customer relationships due to smaller budgets and high competition in the medical device industry. What helps you stay competitive in a saturated medical device marketplace and keep your customers happy?
While we do not yet have formal customers that we can announce, we are expecting to have customers / revenue generation in the near future. In healthcare OEMs in particular, we have found that sales cycles are tremendously long and are immensely hard to penetrate. I think the only thing start-up like us can do is to continue to further milestones that the OEMs and hospital systems must see as they are extremely risk averse. We have to not only prove how differentiated our technology is, but also that we understand the complexities that exist in healthcare around supply chain, hardware, analytics and cybersecurity in addition to fully vetted payment and reimbursement scheme… and oh by the way, also build key personal relationships with the key decision makers over many months and sometimes years.
3. In your opinion, what are the major factors driving innovation in medical device industry and field service today?
Connected-Self Technology, Telemedicine and Data Analytics… and cloth-based nanosensors ;-)
4. What should field service leaders do to meet rising expectations of connected and empowered customers?
While I realize this is very hard in healthcare, we as field service leaders must try to learn how to be more nimble and continue to innovate without compromising adherence to necessary regulation. Our collective goal must be that one day healthcare innovation matches the speed of technological innovation; that is how we will meet the rising expectations of connected and empowered customers.
5. We look forward to your Medtech Innovators Showcase presentation at the upcoming Field Service Medical 2018 forum. What do you think about this year’s program – which topics and sessions will be most helpful in helping you achieve the goal of being 100% customer centric in your field service operations?
The programming around connected devices and IoT are very exciting and obviously relevant to our customer focus at Nanowear
Innovation is set to be a hot topic at Field Service Medical 2018, taking place in La Jolla, California, this coming February. Download the Field Service Medical 2018 Agenda to learn more.