Tag: medical devices

The €100 Million Bet on Retail Diagnostics

Omnichannel in MedTech usually means a half-baked app, an email campaign, or a portal nobody uses. ZEISS changed the script.

In March 2025, ZEISS launched its EyeCare Network and quietly took a €10 million stake in Ocumeda, a tele-ophthalmology platform connecting 700 optical stores to 300,000 patients. Retail stores. Welcome to the new front line of diagnostics.

What’s Happening in Stores

The journey starts when someone walks into an optician’s shop to get new glasses. Instead, they’re offered a medical-grade eye check using ZEISS devices like the VISUREF 1000. That data is sent to a licensed ophthalmologist through Ocumeda’s secure platform. Within hours, the patient gets a validated medical opinion.

This is more than a tech pilot:

• 120,000+ screenings already done in Germany.
• 700+ sites onboarded.
• Rollout underway in Austria and Switzerland.

Retail is becoming the gateway to care. Not the follow-up. The entry point.

Why This Is True Omnichannel in MedTech

Most omnichannel talk is just marketing. ZEISS is building infrastructure.

• Retail as healthcare touchpoint
• Hardware + software + clinical validation
• Training and support for store staff
• GDPR-ready workflows from day one

Every part of the journey — from store to cloud to clinic — is tightly integrated.

Why ZEISS Bought a Piece of the Ocumeda Platform

ZEISS didn’t stop at integration. It bought 10% of Ocumeda, with the option to go to 25%. This isn’t a partnership but a vertical integration.

Owning a slice of the platform means:

• More influence over features, pricing, data standards
• Tighter alignment between devices and digital workflows
• Protection from being locked out by third-party platforms

Think Apple with its chips. Tesla with batteries. ZEISS wants the same control in MedTech.

Where It Could Go Wrong

The model works. But scaling it won’t be easy. Risks include:

• Channel tension – Will ophthalmologists feel replaced?
• Quality variation – Can every optical shop maintain high standards?
• Data governance – Who owns the patient data?
• Regulatory fog – Is a retail “screening” still a medical act?
• EU complexity – Rules change across borders. Fast.

The challenge isn’t the tech. It’s alignment on legal, operational, and clinical level.

For MedTech practitioners it has one more caveat. Vision Care has retail element while other areas such as Orthopedics, Specimen Management, Medication Management are pureplay B2B.

FAQs: What You Need to Know

What Other MedTech Companies Should Learn

This isn’t about gadgets. It’s about building a system where:

• Devices become data sources.
• Stores become clinics.
• Platforms become the product.

If you’re still pushing apps with no backend, portals with no users, and devices with no data strategy, you’re not doing omnichannel. You’re doing PR.

Final Takeaway

ZEISS is turning the optical shop into a diagnostic hub and buying into the data backbone that powers it. This is what real omnichannel looks like in MedTech, where the product is the experience, and the device is just the entry point.
Own the gateway. Or someone else will.

This content has been enhanced with GenAI.

Everyone talks about omnichannel. Few do it well.

In medtech, digital transformation isn’t optional. It’s survival. Yet for all the noise about AI-driven journeys and seamless customer experiences, even the top players are still building the plane mid-flight.

So what can smaller European medtech companies learn from the current leaders? I reviewed the publicly available cases of digital and omnichannel strategies of three global giants Medtronic, Siemens Healthineers, and Stryker to surface actionable insights and best practices.

Medtronic: Building Ecosystems, Slowly

Medtronic remains the largest medtech company by revenue. But when it comes to omnichannel, it’s evolving cautiously.

What they’re doing:

• Co-marketing with Siemens Healthineers on the Multitom Rax imaging system as part of the AiBLE spine ecosystem (source).
• Leveraging social media, clinician education tools, and content platforms to increase reach and engagement (case study).

What’s missing:

• No visible digital marketplace or open ecosystem for partners.
• Limited public evidence of AI-driven personalisation or predictive content.

Ecosystem thinking is valuable, especially in surgical or complex therapies. But without deep digital integration, especially around the customer journey, the ecosystem risks being a brochure, not a behaviour driver.

Siemens Healthineers: The Platform Pioneer

Siemens Healthineers offers perhaps the most mature digital and omnichannel setup among major medtech players.

What they’re doing:

• Operate a Digital Marketplace that enables customers to explore, demo, and procure software solutions from Siemens and third parties (source).
• Use Bynder DAM to centralise content across regions and channels (source).
• Build audience-based personalisation using Adobe tools (source).

What’s missing:

• Real-time sales integration and next-best action logic remain largely invisible.
• Little public info on commercial outcomes (conversion lift, sales acceleration).

You might not build a full marketplace, but the lessons around content centralisation and partner integration apply universally, especially to smaller firms with limited resources.

Stryker: Agile Personalisation at Scale

Stryker isn’t the biggest, but it punches above its weight in digital marketing innovation.

What they’re doing:

• Reportedly implemented AI-driven content personalisation, boosting engagement by 50% and cutting costs by 25% (source).
• Use marketing automation tools to deliver educational content to clinicians and reps (source).

What’s missing:

• Limited visible platform strategy; more campaign-centric than ecosystem-driven.
• Attribution and full-funnel metrics remain hard to trace.

Stryker shows how even non-software-heavy medtechs can benefit from AI and automation. Start with content relevance. Scale later.

Learnings and Best Practices for European MedTech Marketers

1. Centralise your content before you personalise. Don’t jump to AI before you’ve cleaned up your content chaos. You need a workable Digital Asset Management setup.

2. Think ecosystem, not brochure. Medtronic’s AiBLE play works because it ties devices to a procedural journey. Even small firms can do this by connecting education, support, and product content into a workflow. Dont’t make artifical breaks between marketing, sales enablement and post-sale support.

3. Use digital to empower field, not replace it. True omnichannel means your rep knows when someone opened the email, attended the webinar, or downloaded a manual. Feed that data back to the front line, improve on data and feedback.

4. Focus on one journey and automate it well. Pick a narrow use case like onboarding surgeons to a new device and build a full journey. Then automate and replicate. Don’t try to boil the ocean.

5. Measure what matters. Don’t stop at clicks. Track whether digital engagement shortens sales cycles, improves training uptake, or drives service revenue.

Final Thought

The leaders aren’t perfect. Most are still struggling with full integration, attribution, and ROI. But they’re moving. And in medtech, movement is momentum.
If you’re a European SME, you don’t need a marketplace or AI engine to start. You just need a map, a message, and the will to connect the dots.

This content has been enhanced with GenAI.

See also:
Complete Guide to Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma and Medtech