Silverline works with a number of Medical Device organizations to help improve their operational efficiencies, increase market share, and inform better patient care and outcomes. These projects tend to start with an emphasis on improving Sales, Service, and Marketing processes, most times including integrations to ERPs and other enterprise systems.
What we are finding though is that along the adoption and maturity curve for the Salesforce platform, projects that were once identified as potentially future phase are being pulled forward given their impact on business automation and improved insights.
What are these types of projects? Connected Devices.
Customers have said to me “We would love to do that, it’s just not a priority of ours and would be too large of an investment” or “We are so far from solving that, we are blocking and tackling.”
They are right, at least initially. They should be focusing on building the right framework for future success. They need to sell devices to get customers. They need to service customers to drive growth. They need growth to make investments.
However, this often leads to an overestimation about the effort or achievability of bringing connected devices to their organization – mainly because they do not break the project up into achievable pieces. The reality is there is an ever growing need to bring data that is being captured by medical devices and seamlessly connect that information to business processes and operational activities. Think about a care coordinator or Primary Care Provider (PCP) being able to proactively monitor patients by getting notifications when there is a spike in a blood glucose monitor. Similarly, what if the same clinical organization has the ability to aggregate this data across all patients show overall improvements in clinical care vs other providers.
Thinking beyond patient care, connected products can provide a quicker near-term effect on business with the ability to proactively identify when consumables for a particular device will run out and need to be reordered, or advanced knowledge that a part or component is acting up. You’ve seen the GE commercial about “Smart” Airplanes Engines, what about that at a specific consumer level?
In working with Xively, an award-winning enterprise IoT platform, Silverline has been able to eliminate some self-imposed obstacles by medical device organizations in terms of capitalizing on connected devices:
- Proving it is technically feasible
- Educating on the investment, effort, and timeframe to implement
- Advising on scalability
- Demonstrating the business impact
At Dreamforce, Salesforce’s Annual Conference, Silverline and Xively will demonstrate how the combined solution enables companies to securely and robustly connect their products, manage data from those connections, and engage more closely with their customers.
Specifically, we will be showing an example of how an Aesthetic laser, which is a large capital expenditure, can be connected to Salesforce to facilitate proactive knowledge about the impact of procedures on consumable parts such as fibers, handpieces, and tips and how this relates to the service contract and broader sales partnership.
By placing small connected sensors in the device we can determine the health of the device, how often it is being used, and the status of all consumable parts. Changes to any one of these items will trigger activity on the Xively platform which can create records (Cases) in Salesforce or trigger events in Heroku in real-time.
For example, when a Service Contract approaches the max number of pulses used, the organization can automatically create an opportunity and an Account manager is alerted and able to reach out to assist the customer. Further, if a fiber malfunctions, we can create a case in Salesforce and get technical support involved proactively.
If you are attending Dreamforce, please join us at 10:30am on Wednesday, October 5th at booth 2047 in Moscone South for a live demo or get in touch with Silverline to schedule a time to see a demo that works best for you.
Vision is reality for connected devices.
