Since our founding in 1987, it has been our goal to bring excellence to the customer experience. Therefore, it’s no surprise that when we updated our company Vision and Values in 2024, striving for excellence remained a significant part of who we are.

To understand this better, we spoke to three team members about how their departments strive for the highest of standards and how this, in turn, improves patient care worldwide.

Commercial & Sales

Adam Smith, Chief Commercial Officer

“Our mission, from a Commercial standpoint, is to develop and launch products into the marketplace as well as demonstrate how our existing portfolio is centered around the patient and the benefits our products offer.

To accomplish this, our commercial team is extremely conscientious and engaged in physician training and education. We also provide product support for all Merit devices, so our healthcare partners understand optimal use of the solutions we offer, resulting in the patient outcomes they expect.

We are always finetuning these activities to ensure continual improvement on our part. We strive to have a high-performing team that executes our objectives of supporting physicians and bettering patient lives through their care. Our strategy to accomplish this will always reflect the needs of our customers and how we can set them up for excellence every step of the way.”

Quality & Production

Kim Ruzek, Senior Vice President, Global Quality Assurance

“There are many actions we take at Merit to ensure quality in our products and services, an important aspect being our quality management system, or QMS. Currently, we have thirteen systems in place, but we’re moving to one globally aligned QMS.

Having one streamlined system will ensure each site is performing quality management the same, which improves our ability to design and manufacture high-quality products.

A single-system approach will also have an upgraded best-in-class set of procedures and processes, with the goal of helping us to be faster and more agile than ever before, from identifying customer needs and regulatory requirements to designing and building a device.

This will help us focus even more on safety, efficacy, minimizing device defects, and monitoring customer satisfaction, which translates into a better experience for our healthcare partners and their patients.”

Clinical Trials & Product Indications

Vicky Brunk, RN, Vice President, Clinical Affairs

“Excellence in customer experience starts from within a company, and we in Clinical work very closely with R&D, Regulatory, Sales, and Marketing departments.

The Clinical team sees things from different perspectives; however, when we are developing a study, we make sure to collaborate with our external stakeholders. We ask for team expertise and knowledge concerning clinical sites. We do full workups independently of our stakeholders to eliminate bias, but we do present our recommendations for approval or disapproval to get their agreement. All of this results in Merit only working with the best.

In addition, we hold monthly global team meetings. This demonstrates transparency of each study to our stakeholders, provides status updates from the prior month as well as our budgets, our timelines, congress planning, and so forth. Very often we have monthly Core Project team meetings for various studies. At these meetings, stakeholders can ask questions, discuss abstracts to be submitted, explore which journal to target for an upcoming milestone manuscript, provide input and brainstorm if needed, all which strengthens our studies and relationships.

This brings us to another point of excellence we strive for regularly: the ongoing creation and publication of manuscripts, abstracts, and press releases to keep the public informed of clinical trial milestones (e.g., first enrollment, last enrollment) and study results. Publications are critical to our Sales and Marketing partners. For us at Clinical, excellence and visibility go hand in hand.

Furthermore, we partner with physicians around the world who want to present or publish work about Merit products. They also help us design our clinical trials properly, collaborate with regulators as needed, which in turn aids in developing the most solid high-caliber studies designed to provide robust data. This data proves that our products are safe, effective, and sometimes even best in class and allows us to sell these products to hospitals and medical groups around the world.”

Bottom line, excellence is a team effort.

Learn more about our Vision and Values and how we put The Merit Way into action every day to meet the needs of physicians and patients.