Prior to Parks Associates’ sixth-annual Connected Health Summit: Independent Living and Wellness, Melissa Gonzales, EVP, Americas, Medela gave her insights on the connected health market with the firm's analyst team.

Melissa will participate on the expert panel Innovation at Transformative Life Stages: New Parents and Caregivers on Tuesday, August 27, at 4:00 PM. Panelists who will join her on this session include:

• Ori Balaban, VP Business Development, EarlySense
• David Bardan, VP of Provider Solutions, TytoCare
• Stuart Patterson, CEO & Co-Founder, LifePod Solutions
• Lizette Espinosa Veneziano, President, InfantTech

How quickly is the connected health device market growing? What is driving growth?

Today’s millennial consumer expects a connected experience, and the Gen Z consumer will assume it. From our perspective, consumers are driving this growth. Medela is committed to building a thoughtfully connected ecosystem. Medela was one of the first breast pump manufacturers to offer a “smart” breast pump – a connected breast milk feeding experience. The award-winning Sonata® Breast Pump lets mom track her pumping sessions through our free MyMedela® app. The app also provides her with custom content based on where she is along her breastfeeding journey. Our data analysts have used the real-time data to understand the customers’ usage patterns and derive real experience changing insights that helped to improve our product designs and our customer experience through customer service coaching and troubleshooting.

What is driving early consumer use of telehealth/virtual visit services? What factors most impact the experience?

In addition to the tech industry’s investment in making healthcare affordable and accessible, the convenience of on-demand access to expertise, from any location, is one factor driving the use of these services. For Medela, with our New Moms’ Healthy Returns program, we are enabling moms to access pediatric experts and lactation consultants 24/7 so they can get urgent questions answered within minutes, without having to take sick days or use vacation time at work to take care of their families.

The most impactful factors are ease-of-access, timeliness in getting connected to a provider, and having credible and compassionate providers deliver the service – when a mom is seeking help for her baby, she wants immediate attention and she wants someone who can make her feel heard and understood, and who will respect and acknowledge her concerns as a new mother. In addition, we understand the lower cost of telehealth in some cases can be more economical for consumers to access care than the traditional in-office experience.