This MassMedic workshop happened in early December.
I only revisited my notes today. I suspect I was too busy chasing Santa and making sure my kids got everything on their wish lists.
The session, “Integrating Patient Engagement in Product Development”, brought together Heidi Dohse, Patient and Founder of Tour de Heart, and Caitlyn Hastie, Director of Product Innovation Excellence at Johnson & Johnson MedTech Heart Recovery.
What stood out was not inspiration. It was confirmation.
We still talk about patient engagement as an activity.
• Workshops
• Advisory boards
• Listening sessions
In practice, patient engagement is an operating model decision.
Reflections that sharpened once execution resumed
1. Patient lifecycle ≠ product lifecycle
Most devices are not single events. Patients live with them for decades. Multiple implants. Revisions. Lead extractions. Late complications. Early design decisions compound long after the original program team has moved on.
BTW, the same is true for hospitals making multi-year strategic decisions on medical device infrastructure. Product strategies must account not only for today’s use case, but for mid- and long-term clinical, operational, and economic realities.
2. The user is not the patient
Cath labs, ICUs, device clinics, and home environments impose very different constraints. Products optimized for one setting routinely create friction in another.
Field teams feel this every day. Ignore them and build strategy solely around key opinion leaders, and blind spots are guaranteed.
3. Default settings quietly erase value
We invest heavily in sophisticated engineering, then ship devices with generic configurations. Clinics are busy. Personalization takes time. The path of least resistance becomes telling patients to reduce activity instead of optimizing therapy.
I have seen this with highly configurable patient monitoring systems. Installed with minimal configuration changes, their differentiating features go unused.
Customers eventually ask a fair question:
Why pay a premium when the system behaves like a basic alternative?
That is not patient centricity. It is operational convenience.
4. Post-market is strategy, not compliance
Complaints, surveillance data, and real-world use patterns should feed directly back into discovery and ideation. You plan for one patient. You always get another.
This is where AI makes a real difference. Automation for improved decision-making, not just for the sake of it. I recall how manual Excel filtering took days, but now it takes seconds.
Final thought
If patient engagement lives in a workshop, it will not change your product.
If it is embedded into how decisions get made across the lifecycle, it will.