Empowered Patient Podcast Engaging Patients to Improve Medical Device Design and Use with Joy Duemke Terumo BCT and Barry Liden Patient Voice Advisors
Joy Duemke, Director of Marketing North America at Terumo, BCT, and Barry Liden, President and Managing Advisor of Patient Voice Advisors, highlight the importance of medical device companies engaging with patient associations to incorporate patient feedback into the design and development of their products. Patients can provide unique insights to engineers and researchers that may lead to better outcomes and patient experiences. The discussion focuses on the collaboration related to improving blood therapy delivery for sickle cell patients.
Barry explains, "So if medical device companies want to ensure that their technologies are going to get to the people that need them and that those folks want to be able to take potentially some risks of having the device implanted or used on them, they need to listen to the patient and understand what kind of outcomes are important to them and what they're willing to tolerate."
Joy elaborates, "With medical devices, it's very personal to the patient. It's not a bag that's hung or a pill that's taken, but it's typically something that might be, as Barry mentioned, implanted in their body or interacting very closely with their body. So the processes are very technical. There's often a high amount of training that has to happen with those operators, and it's often even a specialty department that might utilize those devices. So for me, at least on the medical device side, I think it's even more important that we understand what that patient impact is going to be with the innovations that we're launching into the market and making sure that they have a positive experience and that they can access those therapies."
"So what's interesting about blood therapy for sickle cell disease is it takes a lot of players to come to the table to successfully enable care. As we get excited about some of the transformative therapies on the horizon for sickle cell, we still need to manage those patients well with blood therapy like automated red cell exchange. And to get that, you need to bring together the patient, the prescriber, a service provider, and blood donor to bring that blood to the table because it's very, very specialized and matched to the donors that donate those cells."
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