When they make sense to bring to market—and when they don’t
By OTI Founder/CEO Randal Chinnock
Failure. It isn’t something most CEOs like to talk about. But I’ve found that I can learn a lot from failure—other people’s and my own. In fact, I have a habit of combing the Wall Street Journal, searching for spectacular screw-ups (there’s nothing like a touch of schadenfreude with my morning coffee).
That’s why I decided to tackle the subject of bringing disposable medical devices to market through the lens of failure, or, rather, what it takes to prevent it. It may seem obvious that disposables make sense. For one thing, they can prevent the kind of cross-contamination fiascos that led, among other things, to the infection of 32 patients at Johns Hopkins in 2002—and may have played a role in the death of three patients. (Substandard disinfecting of reusable endoscopes was issue here.) And, from a business perspective, the high margins that go along with disposables are definitely alluring.
But disposables don’t always make sense, even when it comes to issues of patient safety. (For instance, the need to keep the cost of disposables relatively low can compromise the instruments’ performance.) To achieve a level of success comparable to a disposable VideoLaryngoscope that we developed, or the “PillCam” developed by Given Imaging and now a Covidien product, it’s crucial, I’ve discovered over many years of disposable optics programs, to keep several key factors in mind. Find out what they are in this presentation I delivered at Biophotonics 2014.