Uncommon Innovation in Healthcare: How to Stand Out, Iterate Faster, and Think Differently

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Welcome to the Healthcare Success Podcast. Today, I’m going to be interviewing Bobak Salehi. And Bobak, first of all, welcome to our podcast.

Bobak Salehi (Biotronik): Thank you.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I first saw Bobak speak at the Medical Device e-Marketing Healthcare Summit in San Diego. I was introduced to Bobak maybe before that by our mutual friend, Mark Coulter.

And I really liked Bobak’s section when he was talking because I love this topic we’re going to talk about today, which is essentially innovation in healthcare and marketing.

Those of you that follow our blog regularly know that’s what my marketing blog is about. It’s about innovation and marketing and business and healthcare.

So anything about innovation interests me a lot. So welcome, Bobak. I’d like you to start off just by introducing yourself just for a moment and tell them what you do, where you work, and maybe why this topic intrigues you.

Bobak Salehi (Biotronik): Yeah, thank you, Stewart. It’s a pleasure to join you. I work for a very interesting company called Biotronik. I’m the Manager of Scientific and Clinical Communications, which is sort of a weird title.

It’s very nondescript, but I come from a background of life sciences. I do have an MBA that seems to be kind of an obligatory three-letter suffix to most of us who work in marketing or in business development, et cetera.

I just got very curious about the world of implantable medical devices, and I used to work for one of the HMO-type companies for the health plan, doing some marketing and promotion work there, as well as some product management, and an opportunity came up, so I took a closer look, and 10 years later, here we are.

I learned a few things about Class III implantable devices, learned some algorithms, learned some data management techniques, and in the process, I also became hyper-focused on the idea of innovation.

The industry seems to really feed on it. It seems to be the thing that’s like the buzzword every year, at every congress, at every trade show, all you hear about is, “oh, this is kind of the center for innovation.”

The focus point is all on innovation. And you go around like, is everybody really being that innovative? Are we doing a lot of retreads and kind of cut and paste? Who’s truly innovative?

Time and time again, I find very unusual candidates in places I would never expect. So it’s kind of become a little bit of a hobby of mine to try to find innovative tools, innovative techniques, innovative people. And then at some point someone says, “hey, can you explain how this all works in the future?”

That’s a really good question. Can you teach innovation? Is it a skill we can formalize and teach? Or is it some sort of skill you have to be born with, like a talent or like vertical leap or perfect pitch or those types of things?

So in a nutshell, I’m always looking for a better description of what innovation is.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Very good. So, Bobak, I know you had a presentation in our podcast today. Remember, of course, that people can’t see the slides unless they’re watching it on YouTube.

We do have people streaming, but It still could be a guide for us to talk through as long as you use that as sort of an outline and refer to the, if you’re using a slide, refer to it.

So let’s start off by taking us through the slides, in an order of things you think the highlights what we discussed before, and I’ll ask questions. Let’s talk it through.

Bobak Salehi (Biotronik): Sure thing. So, you know, I kick it off by just stating a simple question. Are we asking the right question?

Most of the time, what I find is that we could potentially get to a better solution, either faster or cheaper, or at times even a more comprehensive solution, if we just stop and think about what question are we answering. What problem are we solving?

We tend to find ourselves in these loops where we just kind of do the same thing over and over. And then sometimes we’re really frustrated. “I’ve done this project seven times, still can’t get it approved,” etc. And so some of the things that we could do is just stop and reframe the question.

So, of course, there’s a little cartoon strip, you know, three-sided tape because the essence of marketing is innovating. And so in this little cartoon strip, the two-sided tape is totally passe. We need to invent three-sided tape because that’s how we innovate.

It just gets a chuckle out of people. I think most people find it, you know, if you have children, the dad joke’s right at the top of the list here.

I quickly explained the agenda. You know, we have the essence of the talk is that you understand what the objective is. Solve for the objective, not the superficial stated assignment. Asking the right question, innovation, whether it’s the label is overused or can you just be innovative all the time?

And then a couple of case studies, and then we wrap it up with a couple of recommendations.

So a little history lesson. In 1959, a guy named Henry Kramer put up some money to encourage people to think outside the box. This is now very much a cliche in every marketing department and every meeting: “You guys, we got to think outside the box.”

But in the 1950s, maybe it wasn’t as common of a slang phrase. So the challenge that he put forth is, can a team of innovators, engineers and designers come together and create a human-powered glider-type contraption to fly across the English Channel?

Back then, that just was impossible. We’re trying to shoot for the moon here. Several teams quickly come together, start scribbling designs on the back of a napkin, go to a drafting board, a slide rule. You might remember that. People who don’t know what a slide rule is are a little bit younger than us, Stewart.

But many, many teams attempt to create these gliders and these human-powered aircrafts to cross the English Channel, and they all fail.

And the issue is that when they crash, it’s discouraging; it’s kind of a strong and negative association with the project. People leave. For the most part, not much progress.

In comes a guy named Paul McCready, an engineer by training, and he observes this cycle of designing various contraptions. You might even parallel that to The Red Bull air races where they create these things and shoot them off of a platform to see how far they glide.

So he observed some of the failures and he says, “The issue is not that these designs are flawed or the glider materials are flawed. The problem is everybody’s trying to solve it in a single shot.”

So his proposal, his solution, his innovative mindset says, “We don’t need to build the perfect aircraft. We just need to build in a way and with materials that are quick to repair. So every time we crash, we just tape it back up and try it again with a small modification, as opposed to six months between iterations.”

And so his approach ultimately goes to a very lightweight material. This graphic and this video is available on YouTube. It’s a super thin mylar material as the outer skin. Light wood as the skeleton. There’s a guy sitting inside this cabin on a stationary bike, essentially.

Imagine a 1950s or 1960s stationary exercise bike attached to a cable that turns a propeller. The guy sits inside this, essentially like a plastic casing, and he’s pedaling, and he propels this aircraft forward, and he can maintain enough speed to stay aloft.

They start going to some scale models, and eventually we get to a video of this aircraft called the Gossamer Albatross on August 23, 1977.

So nearly 20 years after the assignment was issued, or the challenge was put forth, these guys crossed the English Channel exactly as the problem statement proposed it.

That is a human-powered propulsion system on a glider, and he is able to get across the English Channel because Paul McCready reframed the problem.

Instead of saying, What’s the perfect design?,” he said, “What’s the methodology that allows me to iterate quickly, and I can get to the ultimate design?”

I have a few different slides that I put up, and I show you what you’re looking at is not a bunch of sticks. It’s actually an insect. You just rotate the screen, and there it is. It’s a bug that looks like a stick, et cetera.

We talk about innovation as a label sometimes being overused. Maybe it’s a little tired. But realistically, if we’re trying to be innovative, it doesn’t matter that it has a label, that it’s officially titled as an innovation project.

We just have to start thinking, “What is it that everyone else in this business, whatever this business is, is not doing?” That’s really sometimes as simple as what’s everybody else doing?

Everybody else is bringing huge screens to the trade show. I don’t need to bring a giant screen. Maybe I’ll bring candy and a coffee machine to the trade show.

Do people come to my booth because they smell the coffee and there’s some snacks as opposed to I have a giant screen and so does everybody else, right?

That’s a sort of an alternative way of thinking about attracting crowds. So I noticed you immediately responded to NAMM because you played guitar and you’ve been to a couple of these trade shows.

So some of the statements that I shared that day with various people is, you know, if you have a great barbecue sauce and you take it to the local food and wine festival, guess what? There’s plenty of other people who brought amazing sauces and your sauce might be the best, but will anyone notice? You’re competing with other sauces.

It’s kind of like if you have an amazing effects pedal and you take it to NAMM and guess what? Every booth has amazing effects pedals. So what if you took your barbecue sauce to NAMM or you brought your effects pedal to the Food and Wine Festival?

How does that help you stand out in the crowd? So that’s just kind of the approach. This is one exercise I always ask people, like, what are we looking at? Do we have any pilots, any private pilots, any commercial pilots in the crowd?

If there is one, they’ll immediately say, you know, this is runway lights, except it’s odd. These are all taxi lights. I don’t see the runway. So one click. Oh, there’s the runway. So part of the goal as far as engaging a crowd or engaging an audience is, you have to, I used to work for a guy who said, horse, water and a point left to right, lead your audience to your destination where you want them to be.

Don’t just hint and drop incognito recommendations or clues and hope that they figure it out on their own. We want someone to land on this runway. Please put white lights around the runway, put a straight line leading up to it and say, “land in the middle of this runway.”

It’s that straightforward. So in the spectrum of marketing best practices where I jokingly said “rinse and repeat, evaluate, refine, and repeat,” most of the time, if you do something and it doesn’t work, the knowledge that it’s ineffective is valuable.

When you move that, you do not repeat files. But in all likelihood, there’s some degree of success potential for just about any approach. So you take that approach, you evaluate it, and then you try to refine it for your next attempt and see if you can improve the engagement, improve the touchpoints.

The case study that I presented was at this point, I think nine years old. This is an annual congress. It’s a trade show and scientific sessions called Heart Rhythm Society Annual Congress. This is where all the physicians who specialize in various techniques and implants and procedures related to heart rhythm come together.

Industry comes together. We spend about a week or so together at one place, it rotates around the country. The focal point, of course, for industry, is to try to showcase all their new innovative, recent FDA-approval stuff. And for the physicians to also present their papers, their posters, their trials, and the data that they’ve gathered over the last year.

The problem that we ran into was, we’re a small company compared to the giants. We’re in this back row on the floor plan of the Congress. You can see we’re in the skinny little booth in the blue that’s in the back row. The three giants are up front in the huge orange locks. And so our science was fully, fully obstructed by the jumbo signs right in front of us.

And a lot of people come in right at the front where there’s a green highlighted section. That’s the entrance. They kind of stay right up there in that front row. And so the idea that regardless of how innovative our products or our algorithms or our devices are, if no one comes back there and no one sees them, it’s sort of a moot point how amazing the technology is.

So the objective is trying to pull as many people into the booth and engage and hopefully generate some interest. As I’m looking around and talking to colleagues and we’re sort of a little disappointed about our placement on the floor, I start thinking, “What can we do at this giant exhibit hall that could bring people to the back row?”

We recently, at that time, in early 2016, had gotten approval for a product called the Biomonitor that looks a little bit like a Cricket pedal. My first idea was, would they allow me to play music in the booth? Because people have an emotional response to music, even if it’s a negative emotional response, it doesn’t matter.

It’s kind of like, no such thing as bad press. Even if they hate it, they’re going to come back there and say, “Who’s making all this noise? It’s intolerable. Please stop.” But I’ve actually brought them to the back row for an interview. Of course, that didn’t happen, luckily.

But as I’m looking through various potential options of presenting an auditory medium at this trade show where everything is visual, I did have the idea that maybe we should bring a small ensemble of children. That’s always in nature. Last year, they brought puppies.  There was a puppy petting section in the middle of the exhibit hall.

So at this point, they’ve gotten very innovative. But then I see the device, which is a diagnostic device called Biomonitor. As I mentioned, it looks a little bit like a Cricket pedal. I start thinking, you know, if you scale this up, put some strings across it, I bet you I could play it.

I’m a violinist. I’ve played other electric instruments. I play a little guitar too. Not that different. You could turn this instrument, this device, into an instrument. So I start sketching out a couple of ideas. Initially, I’m thinking maybe it’s a guitar, a six string.

But as I toy with the idea of turning it into an instrument, I go back to the violin and I start thinking maybe it has fewer strings, maybe it’s smaller, easier to carry, you know, potentially a little bit more of a splash.

I talk to a couple of violin makers. One of them sends me an idea like this back. He’s like, “Do you think this is playable?”

We talk a little bit more about the structure of the gear and what sort of electronics. Do we go with a Piezo pickup? I don’t know if I really want a true, like a Humbucker type pickup. That would be way too much.

And he sends me a picture after we agree on an approximate cost. He’s like, “I can make a neck from acrylic. I can make the body from maple, fuse it together, I paint it silver, it looks like the real deal.”

A few days later, he sends this picture. He’s like, “I found a chin rest and a shoulder rest that’s removable. So when it’s on display, it looks just like the device. When you’re playing that you put it on so that you can control it so it doesn’t fall off your shoulder.”

And ultimately, he sends it to me in a box, and I order some decals and put the stickers on them myself, and it looks legit, it looks like the device, and it’s still around my book.

And I play it in the booth at the Congress, and play one song at the top of the hour, one song at the bottom of the hour, and crowds just rush in just to see what it is.

People start taking selfies with me, they start tweeting it, it’s all over Twitter at that time. To this day, every once in a while, someone will tag me and say, “Dude, is this you? When was this?” And it’s continuing to produce some touchpoints.

Now, the bigger strategy was, if this is effective, if this pulls people into the booth, what do we do? Do we just stand there and talk to them? And I said, “Why don’t we have one of these kind of half-torso dummies, and a couple of trainers on hand with the insertion tools, and have them do a mock mini-surgery where they show the physicians how to put this in and give them a little demo on an info card and close the loop that way so that it’s not just, oh, they came and saw and it was fun, but move it to the next stage of, let’s actually talk real function, real features, you know, battery life, transmission capability, those types of things?”

And many of those visitors who would come in groups, I would take to the insertion station and hand off to the trainers and say, “Here’s seven more people they’re interested in to buy a monitor too.”

And the touchpoints that we were able to capture, I think, don’t quote me on this because I don’t have the data, but I think it was something like 300 touchpoints a day, give or take a few.

So that is probably one of the most successful ways of engaging people at these programs, where they typically will come by passively and they’re looking for someone, they’re looking for a sales rep, and they might look at one item and they might look at one panel, one poster, and then go on to some other activities because there’s tons of people all competing for the physician’s attention.

Another very interesting outcome was, so many physicians came up, listened, and afterwards told me they play an instrument. And they would very much be open to collaboration, independent of business. I’ve played with several people that I met that day. We exchanged numbers, and I’ve gone out and played either where they are or they have come to our office, and we actually jam right there in a conference room, you know, various events out in the field where this device has been requested and has made appearances.

[VIDEO HERE]

And so I kind of close with the idea that I don’t want everyone to run out and find stuff in the trash can and build instruments out of it. That probably will not yield the results you were looking for.

But think about the idea of standing out in the crowd is really as simple as just look around and see what everybody else is doing. Don’t repeat. Do something different. That simple.

There’s a great speaker, and he’s kind of a mentor to me, a guy named David Spisak. He’s got a show, and he talks about the power of being uncommon and the power of counterintuitive thinking. So I recommend that to anyone who’s interested in further reading.

It’s not really reading, but I’ll listen these days. So take a peek at David Spisak’s episodes, those two, and see if any of that resonates with you.

I also have your podcast in my last slot, as well as a colleague who’s got the Device Guys podcast out of Utah, and all they talk about is device.

I genuinely recommend these to everybody. I really think there’s so much to pick up here. And if you ever feel like you just need a boost, you’ve run out of ideas. Maybe you need a refresher. Maybe you need some inspiration. One or two episodes will do it. We’ll think of something new.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I love it, Bobak. Thank you. That was terrific.

You know, it’s such a compliment to be promoting my podcast. I love doing the podcast for people that are thinking about innovation. I’ve been around the block a few times, but I always get new ideas out of these things.

And I remember your talk. So I’m learning along the way. That’s how I get good, right? I’m always learning. And I purposefully, you know, if we’re thinking about, on our own podcast, I purposely take it to different themes and different verticals.

So we have people on for medical device or multi-location providers or addiction or mental health or telehealth or pharma or lots of different places to go.

Because just like you said, people get into their own little world. They don’t even see what else is going out there.

And the idea of being able to innovate rather feels like, what can you do differently? And so this trade show thing is something I’ve struggled with myself and our company. Two of my favorite stories: one year we decided we were going to a hospital marketing conference where probably 80% of the attendees are women.

At this time, I’m sure they still are hot, but Louboutin shoes were very, very popular. It was probably on “Sex and the City” or something. So I got this big heeled red, you know, patent leather, and we put them in a display with lights and it rotated.

And I remember being in the elevator and these two women got in and were like, “Did you see they’re giving away Louboutin shoes?”

I was like thinking again, what’s different? Do I have another e-book? Do I have another, just like everybody else?

By the way, I’m really excited that you were able to talk them into music because not always will they let you do that.

Another one that we’ve done, we’ve done special sessions. We’ve done private invite-only sessions at conferences. We’ve done box seats at Laker games and Ducks games, all these different kinds of things.

Oh, by the way, we give away guitars now at a lot of conferences. It’s become part of our brand. It has nothing to do with what we do, but I always have a pretty Fender Squier. It costs like $180 or something, and that tends to get a lot of attention. But I love your particular example because you played it.

I’m always like, I don’t know if I can play electric guitar. I’m not sure that’s going to go over, but I think the violin’s a little different.

I think these things are fun. Bobak, can you think of anything else, any final words about innovation that would be really inspiring?

I love just the simple idea of, what everybody else is doing, don’t do that. That forces you into a creative exercise, right? You can do anything but the thing everybody else does. So start with what does everybody else do, then don’t do that.

Now, when you do that, that means everybody’s going to focus on the stuff they can’t do, but hopefully creativity emerges from that.

Any other ideas about that process that we haven’t talked about already?

Bobak Salehi (Biotronik): Recently I was talking to a friend and I noticed they asked me for a little bit of guidance on a topic that I didn’t really know enough about.

So I went to one of the AI engines and I said, “Hey, someone’s asking me for advice. And my mind works in a way where I think outside the ZIP code, but I don’t know enough about this. Give me the top 15 buzzwords in this industry”

And it starts listing out, asking two more questions and then it starts listing various topics. And that was enough of a starting thread when I went back to them and I said, “Hey, I don’t have enough background knowledge about your industry where I can give you advice, but here’s what an AI engine spit out, and my recommendation is if any of this resonates with you, tell me which ones, and I’ll go sketch out a few things for you within these pockets.”

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That’s a great idea. That’s terrific, and I feel like I’m glad you brought that up. That’s really great.

So with AI, we actually have with our company, it was something I call AI Innovation Club every month, where everybody comes in, shares their latest techniques with AI.

We have some people that are more far forward than others. Digital is definitely the leader at this, but I love, I’ve always liked innovation.

I remember early in my career, I said, I read the book about personal branding. I’m like, “Boss, what do people think about me around here? What’s my one-word label?” And he  said, “You’re an innovator.” And I’m like, “Yay, if I had to be named anything, that or Instagram.”

I’m not sure which is which, but that’s exactly what I would like to be. So anyway, after that topic, last night, I was, as always, working late, and I was thinking about market share and where our agency is.

And through that process, I was asking the machine, “Well, why is this? And why is that? And why do you think this?”

For example, we are getting more inquiries than ever that are very, very qualified for RPs by more this year than all the other years combined.

It turns out that a lot of that’s from AI overviews and ChatGPT. So all the homework we did up to that point was great.

But then I went to the next level saying, “OK, what if I did something about how to pick an agency?”

I brainstormed with it that way and ended up creating a content calendar for the year. And so it was still me thinking, still me guiding, but it’s like, I have to have a content calendar for this anyway.

And so the idea of, I’ll give away the big idea that the main idea was to start doing more topical podcasts clustered together along with supporting one-minute videos and all this stuff.

So people that were watching this later will see, “Oh, yeah, he did that.” But it wasn’t like I delegated thinking to the machine. Instead, I used the machine to start and that’s where creativity comes from. You’re always building off of something like creativity, and I’ve read about this too.

I wish I could remember the books that I’ve read. I’ve read a bunch, but, people will believe that inspiration comes from just sitting in a room and sucking your brain and like, you know, walking through nature or going for a run or taking a shower or, you know, studying a problem and sleeping on it, like all of these things help create that creativity. Sometimes it’s like, play a board game, play Scrabble, you know, anything.

Creativity often starts with a hook that is an idea and then that spreads from an arrow.

So I’m really glad you brought that up. You got my creativity going. And I do this stuff without even thinking about it, right?

It’s part of what we do. So musically, I was just telling my wife yesterday how I’m in a different life place than I was last time I tried to write songs, by a lot, you know, I’m married, adult children. So my creativity today would be very different than it used to be. So I think it’s really a fun topic.

Any other comments?

Bobak Salehi (Biotronik)

Have you gotten into building AI agents that kind of do a repeated task for you?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): We are actually using a tool for that that has workflows with AI agents, and we’re doing that a lot.

So we’re doing it, for example, for SEO. We’re doing it to make sure we stay within the brand standards for when we work for many clients, right? We have brand standards for each client. We definitely use it a ton for SEO, we’ll be using it for sales. So yeah, we do that in small ways internally.

AirOps is the company I was thinking about. So AirOps is sort of like taking AI and creating workflows and automations that do the same task over and over again. And that’s super exciting as well.

What’s your experience? You brought that up, Bobak. You must have a good example before we wrap up here.

Bobak Salehi (Biotronik): I was just curious if you do it. I just recently got into one, and it’s nothing super fancy or exciting. It’s just an agent that looks for clinical evidence because so much of what I do revolves around having clinical evidence to support claims.

I just recently put one together, I called it the Scientific Evidence Bank. And I routinely have it go look for various things. But it has the criteria, and it already produces a few bullet points and a citation for me. So if it finds something, I don’t have to go through the additional steps. It already has the article, the author, three bullet points, and the citation.

And that really accelerates whether I want to use it or not. And if I do, it’s just literally copy, paste, and my content’s already presentation-ready.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So if you haven’t done this before, if you’re not really using AI every day, I highly recommend you do.

I use it all day long. And I’m a writer, right? And I’ll use it for mundane things like, okay, I just got invited to speak. Speaker bio, 150 characters, like, now I can just ask the machine, “write me a speaker bio with 150…”

It knows me. That’s a little tip. If you’re willing to give up a little privacy, I told the machine, “I’m Stewart Gandolf, learn from this, keep compounding.”

So now when I say something like, “I’ve got this new interview guest coming to my show, LinkedIn profile. He works at this company profile or website. My vague idea is to talk about this, give me a sample headline and 10 questions surrounding that.”

And it’ll do it. And that’s a starting point. So by tying these disparate things together, now, could I do it? Sure. Do I really have two extra hours to play with that? And then almost never is it what I want.

But that’s the kind of thing you can do, taking these things that are very unrelated. Or, we get inquiries from people that want to do business with us every day. And sometimes it’s hard to tell, is this real or not? So I’ll just put it in and say, tell me what you know about the size of the company, the funding of this company, the backing, its reputation.

Oh, man. And we have a very specific prompt we use for that. You’d be surprised what we see. One of the things I included there is, “Are they involved in many lawsuits?”

And we got one like, “ooh, no, no, no, no, no. We’re not working with this one.” But those repeatable tasks are great too.

Going back as we wrap up here with innovation, I would just dive into, because there’s never been a better brainstorming tool in my life.

Going up on a board is great, but especially if you like being self-driven, and I was just talking to the head of a leading conference in healthcare marketing, and she’s doing the same thing I am. We’re creating the idea. She asked me to speak about it. I’ll give you another one really quick as we wrap up here.

She wanted me to speak at her conference, because she knew I had spoken, and I’d never spoken at her conference. I gave her four or five rough ideas. After the call, I took my Fathom notes and the transcript. I took the notes and the transcript. I said, “Clean these up and create sessions.” I gave her each of these. “Give me session names.”

And after about a few minutes, I had six solid, tight sessions I could speak to, consistent with a quick brainstorming session.

And then from there, I decided—and she’s like, “I like all of these.” It was still my rough idea.

And at the same time, I said—oh, fun fact—I said, “You know my speaking style, what we talk about from the podcast, this is the basic topic, go to their agenda page and structure the descriptions just like they do their agenda page on their website.”

So it gave it back to them, the exact same number of paragraphs, word count, so she could see it in her program, like how it would work.

So that’s another fun, innovative idea. You got me going there. This is fun.

I’m having a ball with this stuff right now, really, seriously. So hopefully that’ll be helpful to our listeners. Bobak, I knew this would be fun.

Fellow musician, when you said, “Ma’am, you had me, hello.” You can’t see it back there very easily, but right, there’s an amplifier, a Vox amplifier, and there’s actually a pedal with a bunch of music pedals next to it.

So anyway, I love this.

Bobak Salehi (Biotronik): So I see the Gibson on the wall. Yeah, that’s my last call. I got that when I was consulting for St. Jude Children’s Hospital. It was in a Gibson store next to the hospital. So that was a lot of fun.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): All right, Bobak, thank you for your time.

Bobak Salehi (Biotronik): It’s been great talking to you.