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What a medical device product page needs to have

The same product page may be visited by a surgical technologist with a code, someone from Purchasing with a tender file, and a distributor with an old PDF. What information each one needs, in what order, and which information the company chooses to show.

Content architectureWeb copywritingSEO

4 min read

The night before surgery, a surgical technologist reviews the set order with a code written down. They want to confirm the size and see which instruments go with it. The next day, someone from a hospital's Purchasing department looks up the registration number for the same product to complete a tender file. And a distributor in another province wants to know whether the surgical technique guide saved in their email is the latest revision. All three end up on the same page, and each one looks at a different part of it.

One of SAI's product pages from top to bottom: technical data, indications, and documents on the same page.

The technical data sheet and the product page aren't the same document

In this industry, the technical data sheet is the document Engineering or Quality puts together: a PDF with materials, dimensions, and tables, approved as a single unit. The product page is the page on the website. It takes data from that technical data sheet, from the product line's catalog, and from the IFU, and brings it together for people who arrive looking for the product. The first is downloaded and filed; the second is browsed, filtered, and linked to.

That difference shapes the work. The product page doesn't copy the PDF onto the screen: it puts each piece of data in its own place and keeps the full document available for anyone who needs all of it.

What goes at the top

Most people who reach a product page already know the clinical problem. What they need is to confirm they're looking at the right product. That's why the top of the page has the full trade name, one sentence saying what it is and which procedure it's used for, and the attributes that identify it: brand, product type, anatomical region, procedure, and codes. The clinical benefit, if the company has it approved and substantiated, comes after that, with its source. A product page that opens with an adjective forces the healthcare professional to scroll down looking for the data.

What has to be on the page

Identification. Trade name, family or system, brand, and manufacturer. When the company distributes third-party products, the product page says whose product each one is.

Codes and variants. Sizes, materials, and configurations, each with its code, in a table that can be read on screen rather than in an image. It's the part most often checked by people who are already buying or putting together a set.

Indications. Exactly as they appear in the approved IFU, without summarizing them or rewriting them to sound better. If the IFU includes contraindications, how and where they're shown is decided together with the company.

Documents. The IFU, the surgical technique guide, the catalog, and any applicable certificates, each with its document number and revision visible. Someone with a saved version needs to be able to compare.

Relationships. The instruments the implant requires, products in the same family, compatible components, and the procedure it's part of. A surgeon who lands on a screw usually needs the plate too.

The registration number gets its own field

The registration number is the piece of information that appears on the label, in the IFU, and in the purchasing file at the same time. If it's written on the product page as free text, inside a paragraph or attached to another value, it can be read and nothing more. As a field, with the number, the issuing authority, and the country, it can be shown in a fixed place, searched, and used to link the product to its IFU. The same product may be registered with ANMAT (Argentina), INVIMA (Colombia), COFEPRIS (Mexico), and Chile's ISP, and each registration has to be readable on its own.

At SAI, an Argentine orthopedic manufacturer and distributor, the website displays registrations from nine regulatory authorities. When the registration number was going to be used to link each product to its IFU, the data was already entered on every product page, but as free text, sometimes with several values together and in a different format from the one the field's own instructions called for. That field had to be cleaned up before the two could be connected.

What gets published from each registration, and whether the product page shows the unique device identifier or the CE marking, is decided by the company's regulatory team. The product page needs to have the field ready so that decision doesn't depend on rebuilding the page.

What makes a product page show up on Google

What helps a product page rank is the same thing that makes it useful. The product name written the way people search for it, which in this industry is usually the generic term together with the trade name: “proximal tibia plate” and the brand. Codes and sizes as text on the page. Indications written out, not in an image. And a URL of its own for each product, one that doesn't change when the catalog changes. A product page with a name, a photo, and a download button leaves Google only one place to find the answer: the PDF.

Once the complete product page is defined, every new product comes with a concrete list of what to ask each team for: the code from Engineering, the indications from the approved IFU, the registration from the regulatory team, and the surgical technique guide from whoever wrote it.

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