Launching Healthtech Wearables in Hospitals | Shreya Divatia

LifeSci Continuum with Bill Schick

In this episode of LifeSci Continuum, I sit down with Shreya Divatia. Shreya has spent a decade rescuing med-tech programs from hidden failure points and turning “it works in the lab” into “it works on a 102-year-old patient with spotty Wi-Fi.”
Learn how I can help you buid a bridge between your business strategy and real growth as a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/
Shreya Divatia https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreya-divatia/
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:30 Shreya’s Story & Experience
03:28 Shreya’s Unique Strength
04:13 Founder’s Blindspots
05:14 Wearable Med Device Case Study
08:50 Blindspots
13:17 Analysis of Wearable Med Device Case Study
15:34 Usablity & Consumer Assumptions
18:14 Case Study Solution
19:43 Learning from Failure
22:25 How to Identify the Right Target Audience
24:10 Voice of the Customer
25:00 The Value of Feedback
29:00 3 Tips for Product Marketing
33:42 Advice for Younger Self
She walks us through an ambitious but bumpy attempt to graft a consumer wearable onto a hospital software backbone—a mash-up that looked perfect on paper until Day 3, when every sensor declared itself “disconnected.”
Shreya unpacks why regulatory clearance is only the starting line, how to spot workflow landmines before nurses do, and the mind-shift founders need when hardware, software, and human factors collide inside real wards.
Three Overlooked Checks That Decide Whether Your Hospital Pilot Lives or Dies
Many founders race from first prototype to regulatory green light and assume the toughest hurdles are behind them. In reality the true test begins when a night-shift nurse clips your sensor to a patient and expects flawless data while juggling alarms, charting, and a shaky Wi-Fi network.
The steps that most teams skip are not glamorous pieces of science or elegant code. They are blunt reality checks that expose whether your device can survive the messy, unpredictable world of a hospital ward. Ignoring them does not merely delay a launch. It erodes staff trust, drains investor patience, and risks patient safety.
Running shadow trials on the actual unit rather than only in the engineering lab is your first safeguard. Hospital corridors bounce Bluetooth signals off metal carts, routers drop packets every time someone microwaves lunch, and vitals rounds happen when your entire dev team is asleep. A single overnight trial uncovers battery-drain patterns, latency spikes, and pairing failures that weeks of office testing never reveal.
The second safeguard is mapping every quiet stakeholder by role and watching how they naturally interact with your prototype. Certified nursing assistants reposition patients and tug on cords you labeled “do-not-pull.” Biomedical engineers dismantle housings for their mandatory weekly cleaning routine and expose boards you never coated for disinfectant.
Housekeeping staff unplug your access point because they need the outlet for a floor polisher. These improvised work-arounds are early warning signals. What breaks under their normal workflow will become the reason nurses refuse to wear your pager on their belts six months later, even if the chief medical officer loved your demo.
Finally, teams must separate “regulatory safe” from “workflow safe” in their timeline and budget. Passing IEC and FDA tests confirms electrical safety and basic performance, but it says nothing about whether the device keeps streaming when bandwidth drops, whether a clinician mistakes an antenna for a convenient handle, or whether alerts merge seamlessly into the hospital’s existing middleware.
#HealthcareInnovation #ProductMarketing #PatientSafety