More than 20 years of developing, marketing and manufacturing products for end-stage renal disease patients led NxStage Medical Inc. founder, president and CEO Jeff Burbank to a realizations: The key to improving care is to look beyond the hospital and into the home.
The Lawrence-based company makes a home dialysis system that allows patients with kidney disease to better manage their own treatment. Burbank talked with MassDevice about how the success of the product hinges on improving patients’ quality of life and how the success of the company relies on the timing of finding and keeping great employees.
MassDevice: What led you to get involved in medical devices?
Jeff Burbank: When I was graduating from Lehigh University there were two areas you could go into, defense or medical. I preferred the medical field and it’s been an incredibly rewarding career.
MassDevice: What’s your value proposition? How do you differentiate your product from your competitors’?
JB: Our company has the only product cleared by the FDA for hemodialysis in the home. We designed a completely new therapy.
A vast majority of patients with renal failure visit a dialysis center three times a week for a treatment that can last about three to three-and-a-half hours. On the days they don’t go, toxins build up in their body. During dialysis they’re stripped of the toxins, which causes them to feel washed out and tired.
Daily dialysis keeps the amount of toxin build up to a minimum, which makes treatment shorter. The medical industry saw a benefit for more daily and frequent dialysis, but there was no technology for that.
We wanted to know what a device would look like if patients who needed kidney dialysis wanted to do this at home. We kept treatment at the center of the design process, and as a result, we help patients do the dialysis when they want, where they want and how often.
By bringing this technology to the home, patients can do dialysis in comfort and privacy. This helps them keep a more normal lifestyle. They can reduce some of their medications, their heart performs better and they have better cognitive function. This all leads to a higher quality of life.
MassDevice: Has the economic downturn had an effect at NxStage? What steps are you taking to cope?
JB: We are a chronic therapy company, so there’s been little impact on us. Everyone is tightening down on inventory, but our demand is rock solid and continues to grow.
MassDevice: What about any long-term effects the recession might have on the medical devices industry?
JB: Economic pressure for lower healthcare costs is going to change the industry. There will be more focus on cost-effective products and the total cost of care.
We can reduce the cost of care by reducing the number of complications. We need to figure out how to cover more people and we’ve got to improve the effectiveness of healthcare.
MassDevice: What’s on the horizon for NxStage?
{IMAGELEFT:http://www.massdevice.com/sites/default/wp-content/uploads/headshots/Burbank_Jeff_100x100.jpg}JB: We are the leader in hemodialysis and we want to stay that way. We feel like we’re just getting started, so there’s still a lot of education to be done. We’ll evolve and figure out what works with our products and how to improve them.
We talk about our products being safer and easier to learn and use. Our products are portable and have a very high reliability rate, but we can make them better.
MassDevice: What’s the biggest leadership lesson you’ve learned?
JB: It’s all about people, finding the right people and the right jobs at the right times and managing them well. A lot of people think it’s about money markets and technology, but the true focus is on people.
People have allowed NxStage to achieve the success it has. This lesson probably started with my parents and mentors across my career continue to reinforce that.
MassDevice: What will the medical device business look like in 20 years?
JB: I wish I knew. I’d probably make an awful lot of money if I knew that.
We’re going to have to figure out how we rationalize — not ration, rationalize — healthcare, as we examine the outcomes we’re looking for with the amount of time and money we’re willing to invest.
What we’ll see is a demand for a lot more proof of the success of devices, because of the cost of economic considerations. It may slow things down. Therapies are going to have to go through more rigorous economic and clinical studies before they’re implemented to make sure there’s the right clinical benefit for the investment.
We’ll need to look at the total package, not just how much a procedure costs, but what the total cost of healthcare for the patient will be. There will be a high burden of proof of success for these products too, and this might make it harder to get new technologies to market.
MassDevice: How is training a sales force different today compared to 10 years ago?
JB: It is quite a bit different. It’s far more disciplined and there is far more regulation under which they need to operate. Whether it is new regulations the states are bringing in relative to gift bans, or other requirements, sales needs to be more knowledgeable and better monitor the activities of a tighter market.
The technology is more complex too, requiring the sales folks to be more knowledgeable. It’s not like they are playing golf with the doctor and they’re getting the sale. Doctors want sharing of research and data and a better understanding of data. Sales is far more professional than it has ever been.
MassDevice: Where do you see the next generation of innovations coming from?
JB: Generally, it will be the capability of electronics and user interfaces to develop more intelligent devices. Most medical devices are fully controlled by an operator. They don’t make decisions by themselves.
There will be devices that will have these decision-making capabilities. Devices will be able to self-correct. For example, they will tie insulin models to glucose levels and use this information to help patients. They’ll be able to react faster to avoid complications, which will lead to better clinical outcomes.
