For a long time, demonstrating the value of a medical device has centred, quite rightly, on clinical performance. Does it work? Is it safe? Does it improve outcomes?
Those questions still matter. But they are no longer the only questions that determine whether a technology is purchased and used.
What we increasingly see in research is a much broader assessment of value. Customers want to understand what introducing a technology will mean in practice, not just clinically, but economically and operationally too.
That might mean understanding the impact on procedure time, staffing or workflow. It might be the cost of implementation, the resources needed to support adoption or the longer-term economics. And sometimes it is more basic than that: how easy is the supplier to work with, and how confident are customers that they will get the support they need?
None of this diminishes the importance of clinical evidence. But it does mean that a strong clinical story does not automatically amount to a strong case for adoption.
Different people are looking for different things
One of the challenges is that we often talk about “the customer” as though there is one person making the decision.
There rarely is.
A clinician may be convinced by improvements in patient outcomes or clinical performance. Procurement may be looking at cost, contractual considerations and supplier risk. Finance will have questions about the economic case. Operational teams may be more concerned with what implementation means for existing workflows, staffing and capacity.
And those different perspectives matter.
We often find that stakeholders agree a technology has value, but disagree on where that value sits, how important it is and whether it is enough to justify changing current practice.
That distinction is important.
A clinical benefit can be meaningful without necessarily addressing the concerns of the wider buying group. Equally, an efficiency benefit that looks compelling on paper may carry relatively little weight if clinicians are not convinced that changing practice will improve patient care.
The answer is not to develop a completely different value story for every stakeholder. But companies do need to understand what each person involved in the decision needs to feel confident moving forward.
More evidence isn't always the answer
There is also a tendency to talk about evidence gaps as though the obvious response is to generate more data.
Sometimes it is.
But not always.
In our experience, the issue can be less about the amount of evidence available and more about whether it answers the questions customers are actually asking.
A company may have substantial evidence demonstrating clinical performance, for example, but relatively little understanding of how that translates into a real-world service or financial benefit. Or there may be good economic evidence available, but it does not address the practical concerns customers have about implementation.
That is a different kind of evidence gap.
And it is an important one to identify early because otherwise companies can invest significant time and money generating evidence that strengthens an argument customers already accept, while leaving the real barriers to adoption unanswered.
Start by understanding the decision
Before deciding what additional evidence is needed, it is worth taking a step back and looking at the buying decision itself.
Who is involved? What matters to them? Where are the points of disagreement? What do they consider credible evidence? And, importantly, what is making them hesitate?
Customer research can be particularly useful here because what companies believe customers value and what actually influences a purchasing decision are not always the same thing.
We see this quite often. Internal teams understandably know their products well, and over time certain benefits can become accepted internally as being central to the value proposition. Customers do not necessarily attach the same importance to them.
Research can uncover that disconnect before it becomes a commercial problem.
It can also identify something more useful than a simple list of unmet evidence needs: where confidence in the decision starts to break down.
That might be a genuine lack of clinical or economic evidence. But it could equally be uncertainty around implementation, difficulty translating a benefit into local value, or simply that different stakeholders need different things from the evidence already available.
Building evidence around the decision
For MedTech companies, this is where the opportunity lies.
Rather than asking only, “What evidence are we missing?”, there is value in asking “What is stopping the customer from making this decision?”
The distinction might sound small, but it changes the starting point.
It means understanding the decision before commissioning more evidence. It means looking beyond stated preferences to understand what is actually driving confidence or hesitation. And it means recognising that the value a company can demonstrate is not necessarily the same as the value a customer will use to make a decision.
Sometimes that process will reveal a genuine evidence gap that needs to be addressed.
Sometimes the evidence is already there, but it needs to be translated into something more relevant to the people making the decision.
And sometimes the real barrier has very little to do with evidence at all.
Knowing which of those problems you are dealing with is arguably more valuable than simply generating more data.