We help entrepreneurs bridge the gap from technical innovation to clinical application.
Clinical | Engineering | Product Strategy Consulting
Let’s build your competitive edge through clinical product-market fit.
Partnering with Healthcare Trailblazers:
Our clients are entrepreneurs with game-changing ideas, growth-stage companies seeking market traction, and universities aiming to commercialize research.
The Medtech Startup Challenge:
The best medical products are precisely tailored to the needs in the clinical environment, but in the world of fast-paced startups this can be difficult to achieve. Startups have limited teams and need to move quickly, often at the expense of thorough clinical market alignment. Without an integrated view of clinical, engineering, and product strategy, entrepreneurs may end up pitching products that miss the mark in clinical settings, companies may invest heavily in features that fail to resonate with end-users, and universities may struggle to transfer promising research to industry.
Bridging Product and Market Delivers a Competitive Advantage:
That’s where we come in. We’re not just consultants; we’re the dedicated “clinical engineering bridge” that helps bring our clients’ concepts to solutions that resonate in clinical settings. Our expertise in product-market fit becomes our clients’ competitive edge in driving clinical adoption.
Beyond Silos
Our integrated perspective helps clients cross the chasm from promising ideas to clinically indispensable solutions. Here’s how:
Clinical
We bring broad medtech experience across multiple clinical specialties including radiology, oncology, surgery, and physical therapy.
We excel at translating clinical challenges into innovation opportunities. Through clinical observation, stakeholder interviews, and workflow studies, we uncover unmet needs and translate them into technical product requirements.
We bridge conversations between clinical and engineering stakeholders to ensure new technologies meet real-world needs.
Engineering
We bring engineering expertise honed in medical imaging, digital surgery, and complex hardware-software device development.
We collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure technical feasibility without losing sight of clinical and market needs.
We connect engineering with clinical and product strategy throughout ideation, development, testing, and launch. This ensures your technology not only works in the lab, but that it succeeds in the healthcare market as well.
Product Strategy
We bring a sharp focus on Design Thinking to our product strategy work. This allows us to build a cross-functional perspective on how technical tradeoffs impact healthcare value.
Using an evidence-based approach, we validate new markets by partnering with clinical sites and the community on pilot projects.
Our focus on linking engineering design decisions with stakeholder value aids clients in achieving product-market.
Meet the Team
Emma Essock-Burns, PhD
-
Dr. Essock-Burns is a clinical product development leader who specializes in applying the Stanford Biodesign Innovation process to realize product-market fit in the medical imaging, digital surgery, mobility, and oncology space. She is passionate about developing user-centric products that harness data to guide patient treatment.
Her experience in Clinical Engineering encompasses leadership roles at several early- and growth-stage startups, notably Verb Surgical (Acq. JNJ), ViewRay, AlterG (Acq. ReWalk), and Ziteo Medical.
Dr. Essock-Burns is an Assistant Director of the Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellowship program. She is also an advisor for several university programs, including the Texas MD Anderson Biodesign Program, UCSF AI-Powered Innovation, and the Emory Biofoundry Institute.
She holds a Ph.D. from UCSF/UC Berkeley's Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering, focused in MRI and neuro-oncology, and a B.S. from Johns Hopkins in Biomedical Engineering. She also has a Management of Technology Certificate from Haas School of Business.
-
I’ve built my career at the intersection of clinical unmet needs and technical engineering. I thrive when stepping into the opaque, amorphous, “must-be-solved-now-but-how” problems that startups often face during medical device development. The complexity of translational science, the power of diverse teams, and the energy of coaching are why I find helping my clients with these challenges so compelling.
My vision for Clinical Product Insights is to build a network of talented, cross-functional Clinical Engineers who can partner with our exciting startup clients to accelerate patient-centric innovation.
