Minnesota is one of the largest medical device hotbeds in the country. Medtronic, Boston Scientific, and Abbott all have a major presence here, along with the suppliers, consultants, and engineers who have built careers around them. You would expect this to be one of the easiest places in the country to run human factors and voice of customer research. For a long stretch it has been one of the harder ones.
The devices get designed here. The engineers are here. But when it comes time to put a device in front of real users, and especially when those users are specialists, physicians, or surgeons, teams have routinely gone elsewhere to get the work done. They travel to other markets because those are the places they have been able to recruit the people they need.
It was never about a shortage of clinicians. The problem was predictability. Specialist and physician populations are difficult to recruit anywhere, and without established relationships and a steady pipeline, a Minnesota recruit might come together on schedule or it might fall apart two weeks out. When you are running a summative validation or an important round of design input, a recruit that "might" hold is not something you can plan a program around.
So teams made a rational call. Medical device companies have to run their studies where they can recruit responsibly and on a predictable timeline, and for a long time that meant going somewhere other than home.
Running a study out of market adds up. There is the travel itself, the flights and hotels and days away for the team. There is the time it adds to a program, both in week-to-week logistics and in the calendar overall. There is the work of standing up recruitment in a place where you have no relationships, and the coordination risk that comes with every extra vendor and every extra mile between your team and the study.
For a company headquartered here, it is a strange thing to fly across the country to test a device that was designed ten miles from the office.
We are doing the up-front work so that recruiting here is predictable, including for the populations that have been hardest to reach.
We are building it two ways. For specialists, physicians, and surgeons, where general recruiting networks tend to come up short, we build the relationships directly ourselves. In the areas where strong networks already exist across the Twin Cities, we work with established local recruiting partners instead of rebuilding what already works well. Either way the aim is the same: give device companies and consultants real confidence that they can recruit hard-to-reach populations here and run the study in our facilities while they are at it.
None of this makes Minnesota effortless. What it means is that the up-front work has already been done, so you do not have to do it yourself, and you do not have to leave to get a good study.
If you have a study coming up that you assumed would have to happen somewhere else, we would be glad to talk through whether it can happen here instead.
Tell us what you're running and who you need. We'll let you know whether Minnesota can hold it.
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