Benefits to you

Patients bring new insights to the table; they help ensure that what you create is relevant and practical. By keeping patient needs at the forefront of your mind as you work on your technology, you can ensure that research and development is focused where it is needed, and the work progresses on the right path. Engaging and involving patients at an early stage can bring benefits later on, for example by improving recruitment to clinical evaluations or creating patient champions to support routes to adoption.

Real-life problems

Medical technologies aim to tackle real-life problems – and will only be successful in the market if they do so. We can only understand what those problems are by involving the stakeholders who are impacted by them. Patients and those with long-term conditions are rarely the only stakeholders of a new technology. But even medtech innovations that will only be used by clinicians – that patients will never see – still need to be designed to ensure patients benefit, and so they should have a role in their development.

Part of our culture

We wanted to make patient involvement part of the culture of the Grow MedTech community, something we all value, advocate and practice. Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) is too often focused only on engagement – bringing users in at the end of the process. We wanted to see users involved from the outset and expected this to form part of all the projects we funded. We helped achieve this, by connecting project teams to existing patient groups relevant to the technology, or supporting setting up bespoke group for projects.