You can have a great device that the engineers--
create for you, and you can have a fantastic salesforce that knows how to sell as value.
But unless surgeons and nurses, the users are well trained to use it the company’s
not going to be successful.
So it’s really the third piece of it to make a successful company.
It is a complicated technology, and the so there is a learning curve associated with
it.
And so we need to make sure that surgeons and nurses kind of learn outside the operating
room so that they are very well prepared when they start with their first cases.
And that requires the help of the salespeople.
training is important for anyone who is utilizing or supporting our da Vinci technology.
This includes our external customers, so that's your surgeon, your OR staff, your residents
and fellows who may be training at the institution, as well as members of the sterile processing
department who play a key role in making sure that that technology is ready to use for a
patient.
At Intuitive, we use a variety of training tools and methodologies to ensure that our
learners develop the technical expertise that is necessary to use the system, both safely
and effectively.
These tools include several different types of items including online modules and assessments,
videos.
We do live case observations and simulation.
We do dry and tissue-based skill exercises.
And we also encourage procedure dry runs.
Then to round out the education, we refer surgeons and staff to peer-to-peer learning
opportunities, which includes things like proctoring during their initial cases, as
well as clinical courses.
This enables surgeons and staff to get the clinical education that we cannot provide
as a manufacturer.
We believe that the use of all of these tools in combination is the basis for a thorough
training on a medical device.
the one piece of advice I would have is to think about training early on.
Often I think what happens is it’s an add-on at the end, and then you realize what your
users are going to struggle with, and you have two kind of go back and make some adjustments--
to the device.
So I think if you have somebody who has some expertise in education and training, and that’s
not every user will have that expertise, right?
Some surgeons are really good educators and trainers, and some surgeons are just really
good surgeons and they don’t know how to teach.
So having somebody who has that expertise, who can look at, okay, well how are we going
to train this?
Is there a way to modify this device that will make the training easier, that will make
that user interface easier, that will make the metrics on performance easier is really
important.
As we as a company have started to do that we have found that that there’s less confusion,
and less redoing things at the end of it if we can get people involved earlier.
It is so important to include members from all different departments as you develop your
training approach and get their feedback and care about the feedback.
It has to be meaningful.
Those interactions are so important.
That's how you get well-rounded training.
You've gotta be open-minded and you have to seek the input of others who know the technology
or know the customer the way marketing might know the customer, or who know the salespeople,
like sales training does.
If you don't integrate all of those people into your thinking about training, you're
going to end up with a solution that probably is not as good as it could have been had you
had that other input.
I think the other important thing is talk to your customers.
Ask them.
Get feedback.
We are consistently seeking feedback from our customers because we want to make sure
that our training is hitting the mark for them.
If it's not, then we're not doing our job, and we’re committed to doing it well.
That means taking everybody's feedback from the person who developed the system from the
very beginning, to the person who's gonna use it on a patient.