Playing detective pays dividends for pharma, medtech and device companies

It’s clear that leaps and bounds in technology will shape the course the NHS takes over the next ten years and beyond – and that’s good news for pharma, medtech and device companies.

As we know, the NHS has far too much work and not enough people to meet the demand, so it therefore needs to innovate – particularly if it is to free up clinician time to do more patient-facing work.

Wearable technology, electronic health records, AI-powered analytic tools which forecast disease progression – tech that would have been beyond the realms of our understanding just a few years ago is set to become central to our healthcare and the medtech companies will have a crucial role to play in that.

I’m a fan of the new technologies, I agree wholeheartedly with Lord Darzi, whose investigation into the NHS last year said there must be a major tilt toward technology to unlock productivity.

But sometimes, you can’t get around the fact that good old-fashioned knowledge of the industry and a bit of detective work – often in tandem with technology – can get you the answers you’re looking for.

4,000 patients but no-one knows where they are? Enter Scott…

My work as a management consultant, coaching and mentoring groups and individuals within both industry and the NHS, takes me in many different directions.

One day I’m dealing in vaccines, the next day I’m dealing in mental health and the next I’ll be working in allergies. The variety of areas I work in is why I love the job so much.

More than 20 years in the role has given me the skills and experience to anticipate things and know what the best course of action will be; however hopeless the situation seems.

A pharma company came to me recently with a conundrum. Through another piece of work they had developed a new treatment – but the condition was so rare that fewer than 4,000 people in the UK are known to suffer from it. And no one knows where those patients are.

You can have the best treatment in the world but if you can’t find patients to administer it to then there’s little point having it.

My suggestion for where to find these people was General Practice. The client countered that and felt hospitals were the best bet for tracking down the patients. But as I pointed out, they would need to have been referred for the hospitals to know about them. Without a referral they wouldn’t be in the hospital system.

GPs are a better bet because they are the only people with a registered list of the local population, and they will have a list of the people with the headline condition, where we can drill down to ascertain those with this particular illness. Yes, we’d have to do some work to review each of the patients to make sure they were right for this treatment, but it would be a great start.

But the pharma company was still sceptical about this approach.

It’s all about the contacts

So, I went away and talked to one of my GP federation clients – who took two minutes to tell me they had over 200 potentially eligible patients across 25 GP practices. With a bit of work they were confident we could identify those who would be eligible for treatment.

I went back to the pharma company, and they were astonished. They had been looking for these 4,000 patients for months and not getting anywhere. I had found a potential cohort with one phone call.

And suddenly, we’re at the point where the company is introduced to them. Could we put a pharmacist on the ground to review the patient notes with the federation?

Then beyond that – what if all 200+ patients had to go to the tertiary centre? You can’t just dump 200+ patients into the tertiary centre.

Let’s take a step back.

Why don’t we get the consultant to come and meet the pharma company and meet me? Then we could look at how we could do the review.

For example, with one case I was working on there were 484 patients that needed a review and initially the tertiary centre said there was no way they could take that on. But we persevered. Could we do one a week? Five a week? And we went back and forth, until they realised adding one extra patient per clinic actually felt very doable.

Eventually all 484 patients were reviewed. And 40 per cent of them needed medication updates and changes to their care plan.

And because the patient had a better outcome, there were fewer appointments in General Practice, fewer referrals and fewer non-elective admissions to hospital.

Knowledge of the problems facing the NHS is crucial

So, when I turn detective in that way, that’s the first thing I need to think – what’s doable? We cannot overwhelm the NHS.

As a coach and mentor, problem solving is a fundamental part of my work with clients and that’s where previous knowledge of these situations comes in.

With the 484 patients, the early conversation was a flat refusal, the clinician could not sanction the work involved in reviewing that many people. But I teased it out, I explained that I wasn’t asking them to do all 484 in one go but work out how we could do it.

That’s where good coaching and mentoring comes in, helping them, putting my arm around their shoulder to nurse them through the process so everybody gets the review.

Could my contacts help take your business forward?

When people come to work with me, I go into that relationship with a mindset completely focused on solutions, not problems.

The majority of my NHS clients are business ready customers, people with a track record of working with industry, of executing good projects, of being prepared to collaborate, to innovate and to work in different ways.

Think back to my example; 4,000 patients countrywide suffering with a disease they can’t be treated for because no one’s found the link between the drug that will help them and actually tracking them down.

Using industry contacts, I found a cluster of them and presented the pharma company with a clinician and a way forward to start improving patient outcomes.

If my expertise and contacts could be useful for your pharma, medtech or device market access teams, let’s talk.

Scott McKenzie helps pharmaceutical, medical technology and device firms get their products and services in front of the right NHS decision-makers. In 2023 alone, he helped land 53 new NHS projects. His 12-month mentorship programme – revamped and expanded for 2025 – offers tools, NHS customer insights and direct decision-maker introductions to get your projects over the line. Find out more here.