Medtronic automates lifecycle management to expand patient engagement

Medtronic, and Virtusa, a US-based global technology service provider, are collaborating to develop robust lifecycle management for devices to improve engagement for patients suffering from cardiovascular disease (CVD), directly impacting the efficacy of disease management, and saving operational costs.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates CVD is among the leading causes of death globally, responsible for 32% of all deaths or approximately 18 million annually. Diagnosing and treating CVD early is critical to saving lives. Early treatment includes implants, such as pacemakers, implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), and cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) devices.

Medtronic, a global medical devices leader, develops and manufactures a variety of implants to treat CVD and devices to monitor patients. Tens of thousands of Medtronic cardiac implants (pacemakers, ICDs) are placed in humans annually around the world. Medtronic remotely monitors more than 2 million patients with CVD and with implants to ensure healthcare providers (HCPs) have the right data at the right time to intervene and care for their patients.

Product lifecycle management is the key to treatment efficacy and patient engagement.

Medtronic’s implantable devices are supported by an ecosystem of external-to-the-body devices, such as remote monitors and services that include programmers attached to HCPs and hospital locations. Medtronic is developing a product lifecycle management (PLM) approach to these ecosystem assets that are external to the body (devices and services) and support the implants.

A robust PLM addresses the evolving regulatory landscape, the needs of HCPs and patients, as well as the quality of the product. At an operational level, lifecycle management will deploy, maintain, and manage the return of devices (monitors).

An important consequence of not having a fully developed PLM is that it negatively impacts operational efficiencies and costs with avoidable call center activity. PLM is a critical driver of patient experience and engagement as a function of the quality of products and access to services

…lifecycle management improves our operational practice and our patient value.

– Steven Laux
Senior Director, Medtronic

A well-structured and mature PLM can drive material cost savings of up to 10% to 15% of current spending, which could translate into hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years. Medtronic partnered with Virtusa to develop an approach to lifecycle management, pilot the solution, and operationalize it at scale.

Medtronic reimagines processes as Virtusa deploys workflow optimization through automation:

Medtronic and Virtusa are partnering to architect an approach to devise effective and sustainable lifecycle management. There are two elements to this approach:

• Business process re-engineering: Reimagine legacy processes and innovate new pathways to improve operational efficiencies and translate them into a better patient experience.
• Digitizing: Convert existing legacy processes into digital manifestations of their current formats

The solution intends to automate business processes throughout lifecycle management. To accomplish automation, selecting and enabling key technologies is important. Virtusa assessed Medtronic’s current systems, including ERPs for asset management and deployment, remote monitoring data, and contact center systems that manage campaigns and patient interactions.

The proposed solution is a three-phase effort, with phase 0 focusing on validating the approach and the pilot solution. Virtusa’s overall solution includes a new operational data store using Snowflake built on AWS to provide a unified view of the patient, asset, and HCP data. It implements key ServiceNow components, including business rules, campaign management, case management, and dashboards. These steps will drive the intelligent automation of business processes through lifecycle management. In addition, deploying Twilio will help improve contact center interactions and expand modalities beyond the phone to messaging.

Expanding the engaged patient population and increasing savings are key benefits as the lifecycle management solution scales and matures.

Currently, monitor returns are driven passively when HCPs inform Medtronic about a patient’s death. The new PLM solution engages patients actively and early throughout their medical journey, which may include multiple monitors during their lifetime. This approach allows Medtronic to engage with patients who may never have connected their monitors or discontinued using them, despite their doctor’s advice. This expands Medtronic’s footprint by three to five times its population target.

Lifecycle management automation allows Medtronic to interact with more patients without expanding its contact center headcount. It also effectively manages returns; the ability to refurbish and reuse high-quality monitors will significantly drive cost savings.

The end of phase 0 has validated the pilot, giving tangible evidence for expanding the lifecycle management solution in 2023. Some early successes include automating two of five identified workflows, increasing patient outreach by three times, and accelerating patient outreach from 60 days to 14 days.

The Bottom Line: Automated lifecycle management will drive expanded and enhanced patient engagement, enabling efficient operations and greater cost savings.

Medtronic’s automation of business processes related to the lifecycle management of external–to–the–body devices could be good news for HCPs and their patients because it delivers improved patient engagement and related cost savings from operational efficiencies.

There may be similar but additional operational benefits to come as Medtronic improves its understanding of how programmers are used and identifies opportunities for improvement.

Medtronic is paying close attention to the success of its PLM efforts with ambitions to use it as a blueprint to replicate the solution across other product lines.

Medtronic is showing that PLM solutions built on contemporary technologies, driven by reimagined business processes, and powered by automation could have significant impact on operations and patient engagement across the sector.