Annemijn draws on her extensive work with healthcare businesses that solve problems for healthcare systems across Europe to explain what those providing medical devices and services need to understand to effectively partner with the health service.
Can you give us an outline of your experience in the healthcare sector?
I began my career in healthcare quite some time ago at Glaxo, the forerunner to what we know today as GlaxoSmithKline. Over my 15 years at the group I really developed my passion for healthcare and my understanding of it.
Healthcare is an environment where it is difficult to work across all key stakeholders, where those that pay are usually not the decision makers (and vice versa) and where patients are central to everything we all do, but don’t usually have much say in the whole process. There are few areas that are as complex but offer as much opportunity for innovation.
My career has largely been focused in commercial, marketing, business development and strategy roles. I started out in market research and insight, before developing to take on senior leadership positions. After leaving GlaxoSmithKline I did a little consulting work before landing at GE Healthcare, where I worked for another 15 years.
Starting out my career working at Glaxo in the Netherlands, I moved to working from their London headquarters for what was supposed to be a couple of years. I ended up staying in the UK, I’m still here and I enjoy it very much.
At GE Healthcare I further broadened my expertise, moving beyond pharmaceuticals to focus on the wider domain of tools, services and products that are deployed in healthcare. I’m extremely grateful for the sheer breadth of medical technologies I have worked with and the opportunities to solve problems for an extensive cross-section of clients.
The other major thing I took from my time at GE was an intimate understanding of how best to create integrated value propositions around the best ways for companies to partner with care providers and healthcare systems to improve both clinical and productivity outcomes.
It was fantastic to be able to bring this strategic marketing experience to Feedback Medical. I joined the business as a non-executive director in June 2022 and I’ve greatly enjoyed helping the team progress their efforts across a range of product areas and care pathways.
Feedback Medical recently underwent a rebranding exercise. Could you briefly outline your role in advising on that project and tell us what you feel are the key factors influencing the success of such an exercise?
I think this was a great time to undertake the rebrand, given that Feedback has a number of unique, discrete brands with different legacy products alongside Bleepa® and CareLocker.
I myself didn’t have hands-on involvement in the nuts and bolts of the brand transformation, but I was able to offer some support as the new brand identity was being developed.
I’m very happy with the results. The broader consistency is great, but there is still an element of differentiation, with different colours identifying different parts of Feedback’s business. Of course, it will take a little time for our customer and stakeholder groups to recognise the new branding but that’s fine as we’ll have a consistent branding set up.
What makes branding exercises a success? Brand is all about identity, and for a business like Feedback having that memorable identity is key, particularly as it is an entity that is still at a relatively early stage in its latest market focus. Starting this journey with a strong brand identity enables you to really grow awareness and recognition of your value proposition over time through consistency.
To make a success of any branding exercise, you have to develop it with the customer in mind and ensure that the brand really reflects your philosophy and your purpose as an organisation. I think what is particularly strong about the fresh branding is the element of the overlapping spheres within the logo. I think that’s a great way to give a visual demonstration of what Feedback Medical is really about – providing connectivity to make all these disparate datasets and disparate care settings much more connected around the patient.
Without the elements of customer focus, purpose and consistency, a brand is unlikely to be very successful. This is a long-term exercise. Once the branding has had a reasonable amount of ‘air time’ on the website, on social media, and at events, it will be good to start doing some informal testing to see how it resonates with relevant audiences.
How do you feel the new government’s health policy agenda will shape Feedback Medical’s priorities over the short to medium term?
Every government has to understandably commit to reduce waiting lists, improve service efficiency and make it financially sustainable and, crucially, to move it away from being a ‘sickness’ service in order to focus on prevention. While every government means these words, they find that it is extremely difficult to drive tangible improvements on the ground, especially if current funding has to be siphoned off to deal with ongoing crises. We’re talking about the short-term need for agency workers because of a lack of establishment workforce capacity.
I have a lot of hope that the new government will look to tackle things at a more systemic level. It looks like the work that the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has done on advocating for greater use of digital capabilities in healthcare will feed into the new government’s actions on the NHS to some extent.
Beyond the ambitions to reduce waiting lists for planned care, drive efficiency and sustainability, the government has outlined its hope to deploy more artificial intelligence and more digital health tools to meet these objectives. Central to these issues will be the question of how these technologies will be implemented, adopted and funded.
Feedback Medical has been focusing on the big problems within the health service for some time now. The company’s work in providing the digital infrastructure to enable community diagnostic centres to lower waiting lists and improve care pathways is very much aligned with the broader agenda we are seeing played out by the government today.
The company has been undertaking a number of pilot projects within the various integrated care systems (ICSs). While the evidence and proof of concept in the CDC settings is there. Within the new neighbourhood health centres that the government is proposing there may be some fine-tuning of our strategy to determine how we can best present the evidence that our model works.
I see a tremendous opportunity for Bleepa® in that implementation is relatively straightforward, so once it is implemented within a given setting and the different care teams are onboarded, improvements in certain care pathways should be visible relatively quickly.
Finally, what are the key things that providers of technology solutions to the health service need to grasp in order to meaningfully partner with NHS organisations?
I would say there are a few elements here. One of the big challenges working with different parts of the health service is that decision-making on technology is long and complex, and finding the right way of contracting with the right people can prove challenging. Nurturing relationships with clinical champions, frontline medics or clinical leaders who understand what you are trying to achieve and, crucially, the value it can bring in terms of outcomes and performance, is vital.
Without these supporters, it can be extremely hard to move forward. They are able to help you understand the decision-making, commissioning and funding processes that shape the way that technology solutions are used by care providers.
The second point to understand is that simply getting NICE approval for your medical device or technology will not help you sell a single unit or licence. You need to understand the dynamics and processes of the relevant procurement frameworks in order to be considered as an approved, safe and effective supplier. But again, this in itself will not move the dial.
What is of paramount importance is your ability to collect and demonstrate strong real-world evidence about your intervention’s efficacy and safety. Different healthcare systems across the world will only consider data presented in particular real-world environments. If you have an evidence base from a cohort of US patients, for example, it is highly likely that an integrated care board or commissioner sitting under NHS England will not find this convincing enough, citing the differences in the respective health care systems.
Ultimately, when communicating with a potential NHS partner, you need to convincingly demonstrate to them the benefits they derive from partnering with you. There is a recognition that this can be challenging for smaller companies, due to the need to intelligently prioritise their marketing and engagement efforts.