Whether considering funding R&D for an internal program, positioning a product for launch, quantifying an evolving market’s size, seeking to accelerate sales by expanding to new market segments, or evaluating an acquisition, understanding customers’ clinical needs and economic incentives and constraints is critical. That’s where Health Advances excels.
Healthcare is our sole focus; therefore, Health Advances quickly and objectively integrates knowledge from a clinical, technical, and business perspective to create strategies that guide our clients’ most important decisions.
Health Advances expertise in medtech spans the range of product types and the breadth of settings in which devices are utilized.
How We Help Your Business
Pragmatic strategies for optimal positioning and realistic forecasts.
Our MedTech team has a deep working knowledge of the healthcare industry, customer, and market trends. This enables us to:
Efficiently evaluate market opportunities by developing a thorough understanding of a product’s most compelling value proposition(s) and its sales impact.
Provide insights into how the changing landscape of delivery, reimbursement, and regulatory issues affect market potential.
Determine which clinical applications to target with potent platform technologies.
Segment customers and understand adoption drivers by customer segment to optimize positioning and salesforce deployment.
Understand the role of economics in hospital and physician decision-making to build compelling economic arguments for products and develop persuasive selling tools.
Develop realistic sales forecasts based upon a rigorous understanding of unmet needs, patient referral patterns, various decision-makers and often dysfunctional economic incentives.
Identify the most promising international markets for rapid adoption of new technologies.
Examples
Susan Posner: “In response to changing decision-making dynamics in hospital product purchasing, Health Advances established our own OR Supervisor panel of experts. These professionals are often the ultimate drivers of purchase decisions, and they are extremely busy people so it is difficult for our competitors to reach them. This new 200-person panel adds to our existing group of hospital decision-makers and allows us to efficiently gain insights for our clients from this important group .”
Mark Speers: “Many of our clients are technically very strong and have developed core technology that can be directed at numerous clinical applications. This can be a burden more than a blessing. Working closely with these clients, our teams can quickly assess the alternative applications with a comprehensive view of clinical needs, provider economics, future competition, and regulatory hurdles. Somewhat counterintuitively, vertically integrating to pursue one application completely is often far more lucrative than developing several applications with various partners.”
Susan Posner: “Our client was facing changing market dynamics and needed to anticipate how growth and share for its product would evolve over the next three years. In addition, the Company was considering launching a next generation premium-priced product with the hope of gaining additional share. Ultimately, Health Advances developed of a rich understanding of the products’ revenue potentials and management optimized the cadence and pricing of the next generation product.”
The interventional pain specialist’s practice is expanding, driven by new training programs, technological advances, growing clinical evidence, and the benefits of a minimally invasive approach. With treatment expanding and the space between interventionalists and surgeons shrinking, opportunities are present for both physicians and OEMs.
Where should healthcare companies list in Asia Pacific? What are the characteristics of healthcare listings on stock exchanges in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Japan and Korea? Explore key insights and trends from the 5-year listing history in this whitepaper. Read here.
The growing pervasiveness of digital tools within medical devices is creating new opportunities to improve care delivery and the benefits are becoming more well-documented. How industry stakeholders should categorize products that leverage this symbiosis, and the implications of categorization, remains a question.
By Andrew Millar, Shoumyo Majumdar, PhD, and Susan Posner
Novonate is a commercial-stage company dedicated to designing products that solve problems in neonatal care. The company is currently commercializing its first product, the LifeBubble, a novel device for the securement of umbilical cord catheters. Health Advances interviewed the co-founder and CEO of Novonate, Eric Chehab, PhD, to discuss the company’s progress to date and advice for pediatric device entrepreneurs. Read here.
Health Advances is pleased to announce that health care executive Sangeeta Sahni, has joined the firm as Vice President. She will principally focus on Health Advances’ expanding Medtech practice.
Sangeeta has over 15 years of health care strategy and operational experience spanning disruptive innovation, product commercialization, growth planning, marketing, business development, and mergers and acquisitions. Sangeeta’s extensive device sector experience from early-stage start-up and large cap multinational companies crosses multiple therapeutic areas, including Peripheral Vascular, Cardiology, Dialysis, Interventional Oncology, and Otolaryngology.
Immediately prior to joining Health Advances, Sangeeta held senior executive roles at Becton Dickinson and C.R. Bard as the business development/M&A leader of the Peripheral, Renal, Venous and Interventional Oncology businesses. Prior to her time at BD/Bard, Sangeeta served in marketing leadership roles at Spirox (now Stryker ENT), Outset Medical, Entellus Medical (now Stryker ENT) and Boston Scientific. Sangeeta began her career in management consulting at Deloitte and earned her BS in Economics, with a concentration in Marketing, from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Health Advances’ Susan Posner moderates a panel discussion with seasoned executives about lessons learned while navigating through early-stage challenges.
Watch here.
Eclipse Regenesis is developing a pediatric device for the restorative treatment of short bowel syndrome. In March 2020, the team was selected as the winner of the UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium Accelerator competition. Health Advances interviewed two of the company founders to discuss the development of their mechanical solution and advice for pediatric entrepreneurs. Note, this content first appeared on The MedTech Strategist Community Blog. Read the blog post here.
Brandon B. Wade, Matthew Barnes, and Paula New Speers
Software-based solutions for orthopedic surgeries have struggled to gain adoption. Will Augmented Reality prove indispensable to the musculoskeletal field, or be considered another useful but non-essential technology? Read
Orthopedics and other device companies are exploring the newly invigorated remote patient monitoring opportunity as a way to adapt to increasingly rigid CMS reimbursement. This gives them an important role in the fast-moving world of healthcare big data, but leaves other key components of that world like aggregation, analytics, and systemic perspectives up for grabs.
By Paula Ness Speers, Masha Dumanis, Brandon Wade and Matthew Barnes, Health Advances and Aenor Sawyer, MD
Growing experience with the use of 3D printing in orthopedics, plus declining cost differences between 3DP and traditionally manufactured implants, are enabling device manufacturers to expand the applications of 3DP in the musculoskeletal sector.
02.06.19
MedTech Expert, Tracy Walters, Promoted to Partner
We are delighted to announce the promotion of Tracy Walters to Partner of the firm. Tracy has excelled during her 12.5 years with the firm as one of the senior leaders of the MedTech Practice working with a wide variety of medical device clients ranging from small start-ups to some of the largest public companies in the industry. She is particularly accomplished in product forecasting, financial modeling, and international markets.
Prior to joining Health Advances, Tracy worked at the Equinox Group where she advised pharmaceutical companies on the commercial outlook of developmental agents to support licensing and product development decisions. She also worked at Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems on internal consulting projects for various Johnson & Johnson operating companies, including both medical device and pharmaceutical companies.
Tracy earned a BS in statistics from Lehigh University, and an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business with an emphasis in Corporate Strategy.
There is a wave of capital-intensive medical device companies that are challenging conventional wisdom of the razor-razor blade business model. Health Advances Co-Founder and Managing Director, Mark Speers, captures key insights from panelists representing Varian Medical Systems, INSIGHTEC, RefleXion Medical, and CyberHeart at the 2018 Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Medical Device Conference.
The pediatric patient population has been historically underserved, in part because designing and commercializing a pediatric device presents a host of unique issues. The Boston Children’s Hospital Pediatric Device Strategic Partner Challenge was created to help develop novel pediatric device ideas, and Health Advances partnered with one of the winning teams of innovators to discuss their new heart valve device and the difficulties of pediatric device design and development.
10.10.18
Tackling Exit Strategy at DeviceTalks Boston
Boston, MA
How can medical device executives best prepare their companies for lucrative sales? Susan A. Posner, Partner and Co-Leader of Health Advances MedTech Practice, moderated a dynamic panel session, “Getting to the Exit,” at DeviceTalks Boston.
Discussion topics ranged from how and when to develop an exit strategy, engage with potential acquirers, and challenging decisions executives face as companies mature.
The seasoned executive panel included Martha Shadan, President and Chief Executive Officer, Rotation Medical (acquired by Smith & Nephew plc in December 2017); Christopher von Jako, Chief Executive Officer, Dynatronics, Board Director, NinePoint Medical and nView Medical; and Jeffrey H. Burbank, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, NxStage.
09.24.18
Health Advances Featured in Diagnostics Investing Panel at The MedTech Conference (AdvaMed) 2018
Philadelphia, PA.
Mark Speers, Co-Founder and Managing Director, participated in a dynamic panel discussion, “Dx Investors: What the Future Holds.”
Scott Garrett, Senior Operating Partner, Water Street Healthcare Partners and AdvaMedDx Board Chair Emeritus, moderated the discussion and fired several provocative questions to a seasoned panel including Steve Beuchaw, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley; Eric Lev, Partner, Ampersand Capital Partners: Brian Miller, Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Linden Capital Partners; and Ipsita Smolinski, Managing Director, Capitol Street. Topics ranged from the near- and long-term impacts of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA) and other Federal policy initiatives on the diagnostics industry to value-based pricing and investment considerations in light of the historic high EBITDA multiples.
Co-Founder and Managing Director Mark Speers points out some of the potential missteps that device
executives may not consider when caught up in the excitement of the M&A path.
Mark Speers, Managing Director, Health Advances and John McDonough, President and CEO, T2 Biosystems
At the recent MassMEDIC MedTech Investors Conference, Mark Speers, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Health Advances, interviewed John McDonough, CEO of medical diagnostics company T2 Biosystems, on the topic of capital fundraising.
Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci® surgical robot has often been accused of adding unnecessary costs to the healthcare system.
The Company enlisted Health Advances to perform a rigorous and comprehensive study of the robot’s long-term economic impact to hospitals, payers and society when deployed to perform radical prostatectomies for prostate cancer patients. The resulting study, “A Multidimensional Analysis of Prostate Surgery Costs in the United States: Robotic-Assisted versus Retropubic Radical Prostatectomy,” was written in collaboration with leading researchers and clinicians at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC and has been published in the well-respected Value in Health Journal. The study estimates that, when factoring in all the costs of a surgery, the robot usually saves hospitals money. In addition, payers and society benefit from treating fewer downstream complications and less lost days of employment. The Health Advances authors are Mike Davitian, Holly May, and Mark Speers. Click here to read the article.
Mike Davitian, Associate; Holly May, Consultant; and Mark Speers, Partner
Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci® surgical robot has often been accused of adding unnecessary costs to the healthcare system. The Company enlisted Health Advances to perform a rigorous and comprehensive study of the robot’s long-term economic impact to hospitals, payers and society when deployed to perform radical prostatectomies for prostate cancer patients. The resulting study, “A Multidimensional Analysis of Prostate Surgery Costs in the United States: Robotic-Assisted versus Retropubic Radical Prostatectomy,” was written in collaboration with leading researchers and clinicians at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC and has been published in the well-respected Value in Health Journal. The study estimates that, when factoring in all the costs of a surgery, the robot usually saves hospitals money. In addition, payers and society benefit from treating fewer downstream complications and less lost days of employment.
“Health Advances has been a tremendous partner to Audax as we’ve looked at medical device transactions. The subject matter, expertise that they bring to the table, their ability to move quickly and decisively has been invaluable to us. And some of our medical products and medical technology deals have been most successful at our firm and that’s due in no small part to the efforts of Health Advances.” Read the case study.