October 9, 2017
Dear Kinamed Sales Representatives,
The great thing about representing Kinamed products is that that they are totally unique. There is no other “polymer cerclage system”. There is no “Bone Preparation system” dedicated to the critical final step in preparing a bone bed for cementation. That uniqueness is crystal clear with SuperCable® and CarboJet®. However, there are other PFRs on the market, so how is KineMatch® unique? Besides the fact that each implant is 100% patient-specific, there are three main ingredients that make the KineMatch Custom PFR stand out:
1) Clinical Results. No contest here! Other PFRs have marginal results at best. No other PFR can claim “100% survivorship after 11 years”. View the presentation (linked here) and our “PFR Clinical Results” comparison grid (linked here). There’s also a hefty ‘competition’ section starting on page 9 of our Sales Training presentation (linked here) you need to review carefully. Recent updates to the competition’s clinical results:
- ArthroSurface study: 1 of 3 revised in half the time our study showed 100% still in and functioning (linked here)
- From the MAKO PF Surgical Technique: “Technique Tips: Occasionally it is difficult for the implant to perfectly match the anatomy”
2) Ease and speed of the KineMatch Surgical Technique has a significant appeal to the surgeon. Our short & simple Surgical Technique guide (linked here) often has off-the-shelf PFR users asking us, “Where’s the rest of the technique”?
3) And the feature we’re hearing about the most about lately is fact that our Patient-Specific, custom approach allows flexibility to address and compensate for alignment issues. This concept can be difficult to get across, but our top PFR reps will tell you that once they ‘got it,’ they were able to explain it to their customers, which led to an immediate increase in their KineMatch case orders. Kinamed’s President, Vineet Sarin, PhD put it this way to a surgeon who voiced concern about matching a patient who suffers from trochlear dysplasia:
I explained that the back (bony-contact) surface and front (articulating) surface of the KineMatch implant are ‘decoupled.’ In other words, the bony-contact surface is customized to fit the bony anatomy, while the articulating surface is designed (by Kinamed’s engineers, in partnership with your surgeon) to do three things:
1) Mate with a patella button prosthesis
2) Follow the natural (unique and patient-specific) Q angle of the patient’s knee
3) Provide medial-lateral constraint to the patella
*Items 2 and 3 above cannot be addressed by off-the-shelf designs because they are unique to each patient.
The below quote from the “Sisto-Grelsamer-Sarin” paper (linked here) provides detail. I highly recommend reading the entire paper – there are several great pearls for any rep who wants to take his understanding on this subject level to the next level.
“The bony-contact surface and the articulating surface of the patient-specific trochlear implant are ‘decoupled’. The bony-contact surface is customized to fit the bony anatomy, while the articulating surface is designed to mate with a patella button prosthesis and provide medial-lateral constraint to the patella. The medial and lateral borders of the articular surface are thickened by a few millimeters to provide stability and congruency for the patella button. The design rationale of patient-specific patellofemoral arthroplasty therefore eliminates the trade-off between fit and alignment that is inherent to off-the-shelf, particularly inlay, patellofemoral implants.”
Now that you’re an expert on the reasons to use KineMatch Custom PFR instead of “brand X”, get out there and make experts out of your surgeons and hospital customers!
Let us know if you have any questions or need help accessing our sales materials on this subject. Reminder: all the above referenced literature, plus newsletter archives with similar sales pearls can be found at our online sales materials ftp site, Securedocs. (Contact us if you don’t have an account yet).
Best Regards,
Patrick Miller
Sales & Marketing Manager
Kinamed, Inc.
tel: 1-805-384-2748 x 207
fax: 1-805-384-2792