EXECUTIVE SPOTLIGHT
Olympus Executive Director of Marketing, Peter Crowley, on Improving Patient Outcomes by Keeping the Focus on People
The nature of our business is ultimately tied up in improving patient outcomes. Helping people should be at the center of everything we do. Peter Crowley walks the walk. He draws from his sales background, along with four key principles he has developed, to keep people, whether it is the patient or his team, at the center of everything he does. Peter is currently the Executive Director of Marketing, Urology, for Olympus Americas Incorporated. In that role, he focuses on better patient care through innovation. Peter has been a marketing and sales professional at Covidien/ Medtronic and Boston Scientific, covering vascular products, metal stents, biliary therapeutics, dilation and more. But describing Peter as just a marketer or sales professional explains only a small part of his experience and impact in the medical device industry. A longtime innovator, he was fortunate to be part of an internal start-up at Boston Scientific, called Endovations, to introduce a single-use endoscope and then later a single use choledoscope called SpyGlass. Additionally, Peter has several patents in his name across several specialties. At Olympus, he is intent on nothing less than transforming the business through improving the
culture and driving best in class technology. With patients and people at the focus, Peter shared with us his four keys to success. They are: focus on improving the patient’s quality of life; manage the end users’ needs and challenges; utilize true innovation; and build and enhance his own team’s culture. THE PATIENT Peter’s connection to and focus on the patient goes back to his days on the road as a medical sales rep. He remembers driving hours through a snowstorm, having been called to the bedside of a patient with pancreatic cancer. The surgeon needed support and in-servicing during a procedure involving insertion of a Biliary Metal stent. Rushing to the OR, Peter was stopped by the wife of the patient. “Are you the stent guy?” she asked. He acknowledged he was. “They’re going to put a stent in my husband today. How’s it going to go?” It was a powerful moment. Of course, he couldn’t offer a medical opinion to this anxious woman, but he did his best to reassure her. The chance encounter stuck with him as a reminder that he wasn’t in the stent business, he was in the saving lives business. He left the hospital later, in a reflective state. That event would underscore a lot
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of what he did from that point on. Given the impact, it is ironic that he later was in charge of marketing for the same stents business in his early product marketing career. His experiences in the field reinforced how important he knew medical devices were to patients and their families. UNDERSTANDING END USER NEEDS AND CHALLENGES For positive patient outcomes, Peter emphasizes the importance of understanding his products’ end users’ needs and challenges, whether that user is the physician or the patient. In thinking about the patient as the product’s end user, Peter uses an example of men living with benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and how an Olympus product could provide better outcomes. “A patient has a choice between getting a new therapy with unproven procedure outcomes, often requiring a catheter for several weeks of discomfort, or undergoing the gold standard in BPH surgery, Plasma TURP. This is a real quality of life situation, and we have to think like those patients – what would they choose?” For each patient, there is a complex equation that determines what will provide the desired outcome: timing, age, potential side effects, etc. Patient education is important. Olympus directs patients interested in learning more about BPH to PlasmaButton.com to support
