Cracking complex MedTech decisions
How SIMALTO reveals what truly drives stakeholder choice
What is SIMALTO?
When product development decisions are complex, asking customers what they like is only part of the picture. What matters more is understanding the trade-offs they are willing to make. That is where SIMALTO comes into its own. Short for Simultaneous Multi-Attribute Level Trade-Off, SIMALTO is designed to reveal what stakeholders value most when they have to balance real-world demands alongside cost.
Originally developed to reflect real-world decision-making more closely than traditional rating exercises, SIMALTO works by giving respondents a limited budget of points to allocate across different product attributes and feature levels. Rather than rating each feature in isolation, they are asked to make choices. In doing so, the method shows not only what people want, but what they are prepared to prioritize and what they are willing to give up.
Why it matters in MedTech
The method is especially valuable in MedTech. As innovation accelerates and budgets remain under pressure, clinicians and economic stakeholders are rarely choosing between good and bad options. More often, they are weighing clinical benefit against affordability, workflow impact, and ease of adoption. SIMALTO helps uncover where the real tipping points lie, giving manufacturers clearer direction on which features matter, what level of sophistication is enough, and where investment is most likely to drive preference.
Why choose SIMALTO?
Compared with more complex techniques such as conjoint, SIMALTO can feel more intuitive for respondents while still delivering robust insight. It is particularly well suited to specialist or harder-to-reach audiences, where sample sizes may be smaller but every response carries weight. Because it captures both current experience and desired improvements, it provides a grounded view of where products are meeting expectations and where they are falling short.
Putting it into practice
In a recent project, we used SIMALTO to help a client shape the most viable next-generation product in a competitive category. The study, conducted across the US and EU5, explored feature priorities and willingness to pay among clinicians and economic decision-makers. While the client initially expected the most advanced feature levels to be the strongest drivers of preference, the findings told a different story. Stakeholders were often more willing to select moderate feature levels in some areas so they could prioritise upgrades elsewhere. The result was a clearer product roadmap, grounded in what the market truly valued rather than what had simply seemed most innovative on paper.
Turning insight into action
For MedTech teams making decisions about product development, portfolio optimization, or pricing, that kind of clarity is invaluable. SIMALTO does more than measure preference. It helps reveal the value equation behind stakeholder choice, making it easier to design offerings that are both commercially competitive and genuinely aligned with market need.