As Opyl’s social media-centric clinical trial recruitment platform and the clinical trial protocol design platform near the final stages of development and approach market launch, Dejan’s extensive experience in working with healthcare channel partners and developing detail-rich market launch and sales escalation plans is well-timed.

Joining the Opyl team in late December, Dejan’s interest in Opyl is anchored in the opportunity to deliver genuinely disruptive and novel solutions that the pharmaceutical and MedTech sector have not seen before.

Opyl’s unique expertise in applying artificial intelligence to health-related social media content to deliver deep market insights, currently the main revenue driver in the business, inspires the ‘MedTech sales guy’ is Dejan.

“If only I had this kind of market intelligence in some of my previous sales and marketing roles in the MedTech sector,’ said Dejan, reflecting upon the untapped value in listening to physicians and patients share experiences, opinions and outcomes via social media.

‘The Opyl social media analytics and insights team can deliver ethically sourced, consented global or local real-world data that is so rich, deep, unfiltered and immediate in nature, it redefines the foundations of good marketing practice.”

He continued, “By providing unprecedented levels of insight into the ‘ real lived experience’ of physicians and patients’ interactions with clinical interventions, marketing and product development professionals now have access to the missing piece of the data puzzle - the capture of live customer sentiment as well as patient-reported outcomes and experiences - meaning they can accurately align their strategic objectives, with explicitly linked communications via the most engaging channels and most efficiently allocate their budgets. I see this as the new frontier of evidence-driven precision marketing and customer service”.

Looking forward, Opyl’s research team is applying artificial intelligence and leveraging social media to address the two big efficiency problems in clinical trials - poor patient recruitment and poor protocol design. “Opyl’s current insights offering to the pharma and MedTech market is remarkable but their approach in using explainable AI to improve the trials sector is groundbreaking,” he said.

After Dejan’s son was born with a rare genetic anomaly, Dejan decided he wanted to give back to the clinicians who saved his son and entered the medical and surgical device marketing space. Since then, Dejan has worked across a range of medical specialities in both local and global markets.

Dejan holds a Master’s degree in Marketing Management and an MBA from the University of Queensland. Having been awarded the National Salesperson of the Year and President’s Award twice, both in pharmaceutical and surgical device sales, Dejan brings executive market and sales planning and implementation experience and a valuable life sciences network to the Opyl team.

Dejan has a strong research-centred ethos combined with a creative approach to identifying value, influencing adoption of new technologies and delivering results. A big part of influencing the adoption of new technologies that disrupt current practice involves leading the target market through an educational phase. An educational marketing strategy is relatively easy to identify but far more difficult to implement.

“During my time as a local Product Manager for a global medical device company focused on surgical ablation for atrial fibrillation, I came across many conflicting views on how it should be managed and some entrenched approaches that were hard to shift,” Dejan said. “After much research and learning, it was clear to me that a significant opportunity existed to build therapy adoption through a personalised education and training process, leveraging clusters of influence amongst surgeons. The importance of influence and a data-driven response could not be more emphasized. If only I had the kind of data Opyl now offers in terms of market intelligence, identification of digital opinion leaders, influence metrics, network analysis and social media communication channel and content strategies - I could have moved so much faster. If only I knew then, what I know is possible now”, said Dejan laughing.

We are thrilled to have such a creative and analytical thinker join the team- welcome Dejan!

MORE INFORMATION.

You can find Dejan on LinkedIn here.