DISCUSSIONS ON MEDICOM MARKET PLACE
C. Bayart Noe
1
and N. Benamou
2
1
Socit Electronique Informatique Systemes (SELISA), Cerisaie 207, 8/10 rue de Chevilly, 94262
Fresnes Cedex, France.
e-mail: medicom@selisa.fr
2
Business Flow Consulting (BFC), 41 bis avenue de l' Europe, BP264 78147 Velizy Cedex, France.
e-mail: nobert_benamou@classic.msn.com
Abstact - The main objective of
EDICOM is to build/establish an environment hosting all the customer-supplier interactions of organisations interested in the market of medical products, thus offering products sales information, together with exchange facilities for both marketing and security purposes. This study is focused on the MEDICOM market oriented objective, which is the assessment of the market potential of the future
solution, with particular emphasis on the identification and assessment of an adequate market segmentation for Healthcare organisations & professionals, segmented on their usual characteristics and purchasing processes and Medical equipment manufacturers, segmented on the “benefit” gained with
I. I NTRODUCTION
The European Union medical device industry produces today a large variety of products, ranging from consumables to highly expensive equipment such as MRI. Moreover, its market size was around 25 billion ECU in 1993, that is 30% of the world medical device market.
The main stake for the Medical Products Electronic Commerce (MEDICOM) Project is to concentrate the forces of organizations interested in globalization of medical products market for establishing an environment hosting all the interactions of customers (health care organizations and professionals) and suppliers (manufacturers of medical devices and equipment). This has become a necessity since the growth of medical market requires the introduction of modern technologies not only for products development but also for marketing policies. Moreover, the rapid progress of information technologies involving telecommunications, multimedia and virtual reality, are technically supporting the prerequisites of the application.
Assessing the commercial exploitability and preparing the launch of MEDICOM is a permanent activity, performed within the the framework of the "MEDICOM" project that is supported by the E.C.
under the ESPRIT program. It consists of two basic tasks: (I) Market analysis (ii) Strategic marketing plan. In this study the marketing plan along with some prelimenary market analysis results are presented.
II. D EFINITIONS AND D ISCUSSIONS ON M ARKETING P LAN
The marketing plan of MEDICOM is focused on the joint commercial exploitation of the
MEDICOM Electronic Market Place. It contains the following sections:
−
Needs, existing products (state of the art in these products)
−
Possible end-users, applications and related benefits (from a customer point of view)
−
Development of competitive advantages (reasons to buy)
−
Enhancements and services required for the definition of the whole product
−
Positioning vs. existing or emerging products and competition
−
Target Markets, trends and directions
−
Target price
−
Infrastructure of the market (key opinion-formers, purchasing processes, attitudes…)
−
Barriers to be removed
−
Risk of substitution product

−
Manufacturing (capacities, requirements, process innovation…)
−
Estimations of the investments required (manufacturing, training, product launch…)
−
Early customers involvement, perceptions and requests of improvements
−
Distribution channels (characteristics and perceptions)
Market analysis is performed in the basis 3C's marketing framework (company, customers, competitors). In this analysis, 'company' is being understood as the future joint venture MEDICOM
Market Operator and 'competitors' are seen in a broad perspective as all distribution channels for medical devices. At the present time, an inquiry is being performed, in France, Greece, Italy, in order to understand the market segmentation and the wishes of potential customers. Besides this, a survey of existing Web sites is performed in order to understand which are the MEDICOM competitors. A initial study of the present classical medical sales channels has been performed too. The actions already started are :
•
Competitors: internet survey about medical devices and a survey of traditional sales processes .
•
Customers: questionnaires sent
−
2900 contacts in France, persons belonging to hospital staff and doctors of all specialities
−
250 contacts in Greece, clinical engineers and clinicians
More than 3000 persons involved in the sales procedure of hospitals or private doctor’s offices have been asked to participate to an inquiry about the sales procedure. About 3% of them answered, revealing that about 60% of involved actors use the Internet and that about 40% of them are not satisfied with their present sales procedure. This quick landscape shows opportunities to develop new solutions.
The basic objective of
is to build a solution that relies on Internet seamless information exchange for facilitating the business relations : marketing, sales process, after sales
(although for many equipment categories, sales transactions will not occur online). Two supplementary perspectives therefore have to be considered, that of the medical devices industry and that of health care organizations and professionals. Although the interest of those two categories of users differ, there are some major common requests originated by both edges of commerce partners, that is, easy to find, widespread and reliable information exchange. This simple and basic principle seems to be missing from the conventional way commerce is performed and that would benefit by the integration of information technology in the commerce process.
•
From the point of view of
, one can not expect that all people involved in medical products commerce activities are experienced in information searching tools. Additionally, it is obvious that not all-available information is interesting for everybody. It is of interest to point out that the majority of the successful market approaches - that are market researches that finally conclude in a commerce activity - are employing either a bottom-up or a top-bottom approach. The first market approach (bottom-up) starts on a specific interest initiated by a specific, and sometimes emerging requirement for a medical product. The second approach (top-bottom) is initiated by the general interest in a new technology. The later will be progressively specified in all details to finally conclude to a specific request of information as in the bottom-up approach. But in general the interest will be either well focused or fuzzy. The role of a tool like MEDICOM would be to guide the users by picking up from the data pool the particular information required in each case and further on follow up the user expertise in the seeking of information. Users that would like just to have a tour around the virtual market place and be informed on technology and products available are not excluded by no means from the MEDICOM environment. These are usually persons or organizations that are keen to see themselves involved in medical products commerce, but they are not yet committed to this sector and that is why the possibility of performing a purchase is very low and these activities if there are any are limited. MEDICOM should also integrate in the IT system those users coming from the academic communities. Academics usually provide new ideas, as they are motivated from their interest on the science part of an issue than in the potential exploitation.
•
From the medical point of view of
there is a key issue emerging by the use of electronic commerce, that should draw the attention of the developers. Providers, either being producers or resellers, are required to have full control of the information related to their products presented in the integrated electronic environment. This strong requirement can risk the
MEDICOM catalogue feature to that of isolated WEB pages. The obstacle could be overcome by

the consideration of a general product form, where products are presented uniformly and regardless the provider they are coming from, in addition to normal brochures where providers can present more details than the minimum required. Moreover, medical providers would like to see integrated in the MEDICOM system an information manager that would link them to their commerce partners. This is a new brunch of services that MEDICOM could provide and should be given further investigation, as it can trend to a stable and thus valuable source of income from the
MEDICOM exploitation point of view.
In general the role of the MEDICOM system should enhance the confidence between the commerce partners and provide trustable environment required in commerce in addition to the standard facilities already foreseen.
As illustrated above, it is essential to distinguish between the expectations/wishes of the two categories of actors, i.e. manufacturers and health care professionals. However, taking into account that investment/development costs have to be covered by manufacturers, the Project outcome could be :
1. A market place that favors healthcare organizations, including competitiveness for the products, supporting the purchasing process and offering Post Marketing Surveillance
2. A solution/platform that favors individual manufacturers primarily for marketing and sales purposes
3. A mall that balances the stakes of manufacturers and healthcare organizations and therefore considers manufacturers as a non competitive group. This is a compromise between the two first possibilities; it would allow a homogeneous access to information, provide some support to the purchasing process, offer cross-manufacturers services (of course post marketing surveillance, but also selecting products on product category in a multi-vendors catalogue).
The approach favored by the consortium is that of a mall offering transversal services. A second step will consist in studying the product, its price, place and promotion with concerned actors, in order for
MEDICOM to build appropriate exploitation plans.