Staying competitive in today’s medical device market means reducing time-to-market and clinical trial costs — without sacrificing compliance with medical device regulations. Lowering your medical device translation spend or speeding up life sciences localization is useless if your language quality is compromised or regulatory approval is jeopardized. This blog explores four approaches your competitors are taking to medical device localization to cut costs, shorten turnaround times, and get their devices to global markets faster. Our medical device translation services experts share four approaches we’re seeing global manufacturing giants use to help them dominate markets right now.

Approach #1 Evaluating Medical Device Translation Quality Through a Controlled Pilot

Evaluating your medical device translation is critical to reaching approval. Many of our successful life sciences language services customers are using controlled pilots to ensure their translation workflows perform optimally. We run a controlled pilot to compare representative content under the customer’s current or proposed workflows.

After the pilot, we evaluate results by language and content type. This approach is more comprehensive than just pulling an aggregate score. Lastly, this pilot is accompanied by both a change management and training plan. These measures ensure all stakeholders are kept informed and are ready to execute the new processes after the pilot is concluded.

Approach #2 Measuring the Total Economics of Medical Device Translation Services

Some medical device manufacturers divide their medical device translation services among many life sciences translation services providers, missing out on the savings of consolidating to a select set of preferred vendors. When manufacturers work with just two or three vendors, they can benefit from such efficiencies as translation memory savings and volume discounts. These occur over a series of projects, not just one. Beyond translation memory savings, vendor consolidation can optimize other language strategy costs related to:

• Technology/setup charges
• Vendor management
• Required human review
• Necessary formatting and rework
• Total cost per accepted deliverable

Another, more accurate way to evaluate the total spend for language budget is to compare vendors by non-commercial measures, such as:

• Like-for-like content
• Language mix
• Reuse levels
• Service scope
• AI maturity
• Governance methodology

These factors in an overall program seriously impact language spend and timelines more than a deep discount on one project.

Lastly, consider AI productivity gains. Powerful AI-enhanced workflows will deliver priceless multiplying benefits for medical device manufacturers now and into the future.

Approach #3 Connect Medical Device Translation Performance to Commercial Readiness and Buyer Experience

To get the most effective medical device translation, evaluate it by how it affects commercial readiness and buyer experience. Measure translation turnaround times, not just for your translation partners, but also for the buyer and reviewer processes. Consider these KPIs:

• Time from translation request to medical device approval
• Usable translated content

Another tactic is to use a balanced scorecard with topics like:

• Quality acceptance
• Total cost
• Review hours
• End-to-end cycle time
• On-time availability for launch/training
• Stakeholder satisfaction

Lastly, address these items as part of implementation:

• Platform integration
• Asset migration
• User adoption

Use a phased approach for these steps, going from baseline, to pilot, to evaluation, to scale, to monitoring.

Approach #4 Safely Implement AI into Workflows to Get to Market Faster

Using AI-powered translation for life sciences is vital to staying competitive in medical device markets worldwide. Getting to market faster than your competitors isn’t simple, but safely implementing AI in your medical device translation workflows is key. While life sciences localization has initially shied away from AI usage due to risk and compliance concerns, industry giants are now embracing it.

Keep up with competitors as you race to device approval and the markets by partnering with providers like Lionbridge. We have years of AI and medical device experience, and we understand how to implement it compliantly in workflows.

Get in touch

How will you get to market faster this year? How will you ensure more efficient spend on your medical device translation? Lionbridge can help you strategize and share tactics medical device giants use worldwide to win in their target markets. Let’s get in touch.