BRIEF23 brings you insights and inspiration from Karan Mehrotra, Marketing Head, Elekta (India) – a leading innovator of precision radiation therapy solutions and more, with headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden with offices in more than 120 countries around, and listed on Nasdaq Stockholm.
Karan writes on invitation and exclusively for our special series BRIEF23, which features industry stalwarts, thought leaders, industry captains, business heads, brand custodians and other C-suite heads from diverse companies across sectors, size and scale, sharing their learnings from 2022, and guidance and inspiration to help empower professionals for the upcoming FY 2023-24.
Karan is a senior marketing professional with extensive experience in the Medical Technology Industry. In his current capacity as the Head of Marketing & Communication – India, Sr. Marketing Manager, Middle East & Africa, at Elekta he works closely with clinicians and investors to enable access to cancer care across South Asian, Middle East, and African countries.
BRIEF23 by Karan Mehrotra – Elekta India
2022 defined: Access to cancer treatment continues to be an alarming public health dilemma in India. While on one hand, the cancer burden is steadily rising, on the other, we are grappling to keep pace.
The WHO recommends one linear accelerator per million population, however, we are around 0.4 and that disparity keeps growing every day. Access is the key challenge that Elekta is focused on solving. While complementing challenges such as upskilling, quality in care delivery, and digitization are subsets of the access problems, Elekta is focused on delivering a holistic solution that benefits the care ecosystem in totality.
Currently, Elekta is the preferred partner for most All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) centers in the country. We work closely with the public sector to offer our best to the nation.
In the private sector, we have collaborations across large enterprises to address the access gap. This is apart from the individual hospitals and clinics that Elekta offers its technologies. These collaborations are a step in the direction of strategically identifying and sustainably fixing problems.
On track, ahead of, or trailing the pack?: The simple answer to this is ahead. Elekta is the only company of scale focusing exclusively on radiation therapy. Our product portfolio is comprised of linear accelerators, brachytherapy devices, Leksell Gamma Knife systems, MR-Linac (Elekta Unity), and a suite of oncology informatics software.
The evolution of technology enables individually tailored, precise radiotherapy for each patient that needs it. This is done through a combination of advanced hardware and sophisticated software. As the next step, we have now included the patient in the care journey.
Our software module allows patients to capture and communicate their symptoms once they have left the hospital. “Cured” cancer, as we know it, is just cancer in remission and the software module helps keep it that way. The potential of software goes far beyond what one sees today. The data generated can help in predictive modeling and allow clinicians to get ahead of the disease.
Additionally, we have helped set up hub-and-spoke models that allow for centralized planning of treatment. What does that mean? The level of care that was once isolated to a metro city can now be found in tier 2 or 3 cities as well with no compromise.
We augment this by offering top-notch service and support experience. An increasing portion of assistance is now monitored and provided remotely thanks to the AI-based Elekta IntelliMax system, which is linked to 80% of the installed base.
The software predicts a potential breakdown before it actually happens, allowing for minimal downtime of the system. It reduces costs and increases efficiency, striving to ensure that no patient is denied access to their treatment.
Under the hood: There is a lot that goes on under the hood to make the ecosystem seamless. To enable access, a lot of our effort has been directed toward upskilling.
Our education & training initiatives bridge the gap between academia and industry. To provide radiation oncologists, radiotherapy technologists, and medical physicists with the necessary knowledge and training on the most recent treatment methods and technological advancements, we established a joint educational facility in Mumbai with HCG.
In addition, we collaborated with the prestigious Anna University, Chennai to put together a training lab for Medical Physics. The lab conducts training related to the use of radiotherapy treatment planning tools with the objective to have more industry-ready graduates.
Lessons learnt: One of the things we all must accept is that there is no real growth without collaboration. Complementing technologies are necessary for the care pathway and it is imperative to have the right partners to deliver alongside.
For novel image-guided adaptive, personalised treatment to help improve cancer care, we have a global commercial collaboration agreement with GE Healthcare in the field of radiation oncology. Similarly, we had a strategic partnership with Philips for developing Elekta Unity, the first high-field MR-Linac (linear accelerator).
We have established inspirational programmes with our customers through our Kaiku Health partnership with major pharacmaceutical firms, providing more individualised and precise care through patient reporting and AI side effect monitoring.
Who/What inspired me: I do not believe there is inspiration to be found in an individual in isolation. Different individuals embody different traits that deserve recognition and emulation. The important question is – how are they making it count and does that inspire you?
Looking ahead: Elekta is working towards a world where everyone has access to the best cancer care. We are doing this through our strategy, ACCESS 2025. The strategy is built on three pillars: Availability of care, Elevation of care, and Participation in care.
Availability of care focuses on improving patient access to precision radiation medicine globally by improving available resources for the population. By 2025 we aim to provide an additional 300 million people access to radiotherapy by adding 825 linear accelerators in underserved markets.
Elevation of care is to improve patient access to better and more efficient care by driving clinical adoption of contemporary technologies, optimal utilization of existing technologies, as well as improving clinical decision support via analytics. To quantify this, we are looking to double the clinical usage of short-course treatments and quadruple the usage of adaptive treatments among Elekta customers.
Participation in care is to improve the ability of patients and their care teams to together improve clinical outcomes through deeper and richer patient data. The goal is to have 20% of Elekta’s customer’s patients actively interacting with their own care journey. The number currently stands at under 1%.
And here’s how we’ll do it!: We are driving our objective by introducing new technology in the market. We recently inaugurated the first Elekta Harmony linac in India. It is the most versatile linac ever made by Elekta and was built on the feedback of clinicians from countries like India. We will soon inaugurate our first Elekta Unity, MR-Linac, in the country as well.
It’s the most advanced technology on the market for adaptive treatments. We have already demonstrated our success in the hub-and-spoke planning model with HCG. We are working with the public sector to drive optimisation and technology adoption.
Oncology informatics software is a big focus area for us to put all the pieces together and drive a robust data-rich ecosystem. We are working on PPP models for furthering access, and education partnerships to upskill the clinical community. All these aspects put together will help us deliver on our strategy.
Advice: I would give the following advice to young sales professionals, based on my decade and a half of experience working with multinational companies that are leaders in the medical device industry in India.
- There is a demand and there is supply. What differentiates you from others is your ability to understand the problem and provide a solution. You are a consultant. Do your homework and consult. That’s 90% of the battle.
- Never make promises you can’t keep. You carry your relationships with you. You might lose that order today but gain faith. In the long run, that’s more important than the immediate sale.
- Put on their shoes. When you walk into a room for a discussion, you should have already played out all the possible doubts that you would have had if you were the customer.
- Go prepared. Nobody likes their time wasted.
- Accept that you don’t know the answer if it’s out of your depth. Get the answer and circle back. Helps keep the faith alive.
One big learning/realization: My last read was “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazi. Early in life, Ferrazzi realised that the ability to harness the power of relationships for the benefit of all parties is what sets extremely successful people apart from everyone else. Ferrazzi’s method of interacting with the world revolves around helping friends get in touch with other friends and is built on giving. Collaboration beats competition. Oh, oh!
The quote or thought that’ll inspire me in 2023:
Well, it’s not really a quote but a prayer. One of the biggest learning lessons for humanity was Covid-19. Nobody had fathomed the implications the pandemic would have. Today we are past that but there are other economic factors that are shaking people’s faith and disrupting livelihoods. This will continue to happen. So here is what gives me clarity and acceptance to move along. I hope it gives you some too.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – Reinhold Niebuhr