Partnering with MDs as an Industry

Matthew Mace, President & Co-Founder of Study Connect

Note: This is an edited transcript from the MedTech Summit talk Matthew presented on July 8, 2025.

Thanks, everyone who's joining, attending, and watching the repeat of that. My name is Matthew Mace, I've been in the medical research space for about 16 years, mostly in cardiovascular space. And I just wanted to share a few experiences.

I had some of my time previously at Abbott, big other blue chip companies before entering entrepreneurship. And partnering with MDs is a big passion of mine, which is only how we move the industry forward. And as we just heard about, the design is centered around what we need to perform for our patients.

But the gatekeepers, which are the big scary buildings called hospitals—really want to answer that question, like why should we partner with MDs? And I have this Venn diagram that I talk about at different stages of your lifecycle, you need to look at very different tools.

The Lifecycle Approach

So we start out with needing to validate the product. We need to build advisory boards and programs. And we also need to look at the clinical studies to ultimately get approval. And the way I divide that in my head, and I think I challenge everyone to do so, is thinking about the types of physicians or healthcare professionals or APPs and nurses that we need to partner with in the context of the life cycle of the product.

So where are we in the development of our product that we need to focus on? So if we're at the very late stages, we need a very different persona than when we're at the concepting stage. So I'm going to talk about some early ideas and the personas that we want to target there. Looking at the preclinical development that a completely different skillset when we're starting to engineer the products together. What do we need for the clinical validation stages? And then laterally, which will take up most of our time and as an ongoing process, which is, what is the post-approval adoption phase looking like and what does the growth stage penetration look like?

And we're going to need different mixes of different people to help us in this process.

The Do's and Don'ts

So just straight off the bat, what I always like to share is the do's and don'ts and at Study Connect, we help connect physicians and life science companies to advance their ideas forward. And we always share these sort of do's and don'ts.

So it's all about building trust. That's how we center every single relationship. So one of the biggest things that if you don't remember anything else, please take away. Always please do compensate your MDs and any healthcare professionals. Honorariums do one or two things. They, one, protect your IP, and they protect the IP generated through your discussions.

So you want to do that, and you want to make sure the rates are benchmarked. And I have a little schema I'm going to share with you about that in a moment. The other side is making sure that you have really free flowing continuous discussions. That you treat this as a partnership. This is not a one-way street. You're going to need these folks for a very long period of time, and making sure that you can work with each other and you understand where each other is, and there's no surprises on either way.

The final thing I always take away is really define the role and the responsibility. And what we really mean is saying, who is part of the team and who is making decisions and who does this advisor report to and who do they connect with? And making sure that there's a mutual respect that nobody oversteps the boundary of how you work.

Now that's building trust and it's hard to build trust, and it's very easy to lose trust. And the quickest way I've always found actually to lose trust is to be over reliant on a few advisors. Basically you're increasing the business risk. So the likelihood of making a decision where the advice is going to send you on a direction that the market doesn't like eventually. Or it could just lead to ultimate burnout, as in there are just too many ideas for one person to handle.

The second side is actually removing the fluff, remembering that these are advisors, these need to get under the hood of what you are as a company. Definitely do not repeat marketing claims. You may have an aspiration of the product that you want to build, what you want to go towards, but keep every discussion very scientific and very focused.

Really linked onto that is making sure that you're well prepared, making sure that the focusing on the expertise and what the expert can give you.

So, if you are asking about how patients are managed in a certain clinic setting, I wouldn't really be going speaking to your phlebotomist about that. So making sure that you are not asking very generic questions, general questions. You're very focusing on where they can help you, and where they can bring it forward. So definitely those two sides.

Building trust takes a very long time and being really diligent and focused on that. And it's very easier to hurt trust and I would avoid those mistakes.

Compensation: Market Rates

The number one thing always asked, so I thought I would show it just a very brief schema of how I consider market rates. So I use two types of matrix to figure out market rates.

Either one, for early stage companies, it's worked really well. You consider what's your average pay for your senior team in your company, and you can look at multiples of that.

The other way of think about it is you could consider, okay, what's the average salary for this profession that I'm focusing on, and are they junior, senior director or expert level? And then you apply multiples to that. It's not too complicated, but the only thing I wanted to always pull away, the number one mistake people tend to make is they try to exchange compensation for equity.

Now, equity is very important when it comes to build up long-term value, but actually at some of these early stages, especially, you need to advisor to be hungry and engaged with you in the process and enthusiastic.

So I'm going to whittle through these very quickly, but I'll show you the first one in detail and work through. So if you think of an MD specialist, $200, $300 an hour is the average salary. You could work that across the junior level to the expert level if you work that out.

Or you could consider if you're in an early stage, what's a multiple of your average senior executive salary. So, if your senior executive team are getting $95,000, that's approximately $50 an hour, you can quickly multiply that up. There's just a litmus test that you're giving a fair compensation based upon where you are as a company, and then you can work it down the level, maybe they're the MD but they're in a general specialty.

So that has a lower rate, and then you'd work it through with the APPs, the research nurses, the statisticians, and the patients. I'm actually very happy if anyone wants to email me, I'm happy to share this market rate diagram with them afterwards.

Three Types of Medical Advisors

So now we've got that and we understand that we're going to compensate, what is the right stage that we need to focus on? So I've been very fortunate to be in the medical, cardiovascular space for 16 years. So I have built this network around me of people of very different stages. One of the disclaimers I always give is like, the word key opinion leader is overused and is very subjective. They're opinion leader as in, they talk about what they have and they're able to bring people along and able to talk about the product with passion and virility.

So that's really what I mean by it. So I'm just going to give these three levels and I'm going to work through them in a little bit and hopefully just stimulate some ideas of going, okay, where are we in our growth journey and have we got the right advisors to push us through that journey.

So we're going to be talking about early advisors, the collaborators, and the trialists in that same Venn diagram schema that I spoke to a moment ago.

Early Stage Advisors: Customer Validation

So customer validation is really, I talk about the early stage. The early stage advisor is really about trying to uncover, "are we building towards something that can be in the market?"

So we need to uncover those needs. And we had a great example about actually uncovering needs and going to Africa and go, okay, this is a really big need that is here, that we didn't find until we spoke to enough patients. We need to explore the concepts and then we need to be able to be introduced to other people and understand do they have the same needs?

So my bias really in this group of physicians at the really early stage is not to go for the big name. Find someone who's patient focused, patient facing, and a mid senior level experience.

So they're able to give you a broad view. They've been around, they have a good understanding, and they're also able to work with you. As you're developing your idea, this is early stage. This is validating the product concept that we have.

Collaborators: Design and Development

The next step is obviously going to be moving on to, we have a concept, we have a design, and now we're moving on to trying to challenge and making sure that this idea has scalability when we bring it to the market, that we're able to really push through the design process where we've made able to make critical decisions. And it's really important that who you work with can help you challenge those assumptions, but ultimately build you a core network that can get you market access in the future.

If you're unable to get this, then your idea, your concept is not going to have that scale. But just the one thing I keep in mind is it is the goal and it's the requirement of the advisors to challenge you in this thing. So they need to be aligned and motivated. That's very clear. They need to like your idea, but they also need to have deep domain expertise. So this is very likely to be the sort of expert level when you bring those people in, whether it's expert nurses or expert MDs, or very high degree patient advocacy groups that are going to challenge your ideas and really stress test your market access plan before you go into the clinical trial.

As we just heard in device development, it's easier to make a change at this stage before we start testing the device on patients.

Clinical Trialists: Execution Phase

And the last one I'm going to be talking about is when we're into that clinical study phase. We need a completely different, and we need a really wide net here. And everything we've done up until this point is building up that foundation of making a strong network. So we've had those weekly meetings and monthly meetings with our advisors, and we have that very strong network.

You need three things in a clinical trial to be on time. And if anyone's had the misfortune to run a clinical trial, they realize they're normally over budget and over time. But if you're able to set yourself a foundation, you could find physicians to work with that have the right patient reach. They're in diverse locations. Obviously diversity is very important.

Now as we get approval of medical devices, and I always keep this concept in mind and I tell my clinical teams when we run our last trial, Capture-HF, which is a 1600 patient heart failure trial. Like, our goal is to speak to people until we're completely oversubscribed and we feel like we're bursting at the seams, or there's no way we can take on any more sites or any more patients. Because invariably, when you start contracting with hospitals, there is an attrition rate that you've not expected, the contracting takes too long, et cetera, et cetera.

In the scope of the work here, the MDs that you need to be involved, they need to be enthusiastic. They want do the trial. They want to push forward, and they are going to be across all levels. But one of the contrarian things that we've found, especially over the last five years to a decade, is that indexing your clinical trial sites to junior, not naive, but junior investigators, junior sites, will definitely accelerate the entire trial process.

Key Takeaways

So tying that all in together. We need to make sure we match the development stage to the experts that we have find we need to compensate them. We need to benchmark those rates and we need to build that pipeline of advisors to come through. And I'll leave it really with some of these things.

Some of the takeaways that we want to keep in mind is that early stage advisors, they're not your customers. They have enthusiasm and that isn't an intent to buy, but that's not what you are testing at the early stages. You are trying to test, is there a real clinical need here to push forward for.

Your collaborators are actually the ones that are supposed to test your go to market strategy once you've fixated on a device, on a roadmap. And just don't misinterpret challenges as a lack of scales with quite a lot of the time. We've already established there is a need. They're trying to push you and help you grow. And they should definitely encourage that.

And then in the trial format, just always be aware that juniors do always outperform big names. Big hospitals don't always mean big enrollments and I want to give that as the takeaway.

That's really it here. I'll leave it there. Happy to pause for any questions, but my details are at the bottom and I'm also happy to speak to people and share my slides as they are.

Matthew Mace is President & Co-Founder of Study Connect.