In the dynamically changing healthcare landscape, innovation alone is not enough. Companies and scientists must form strategic alliances, especially in regions with complex regulatory environments. Only such an approach helps to achieve big goals, competently distributing the responsibilities and resources of laboratories and developers.
Alina Toichubaeva, a biotechnologist, business developer, and representative of several MedTech companies, shared how strategic partnerships in healthcare can become a catalyst for progress. She built the most effective partnership principles based on her experience in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
Finding the Right Partner
Digital health systems and healthcare companies have entered 50 to 100 partnerships annually over the past 5 years (Statista). In 2024, this number reached 68 in the first three quarters of the year. Companies in the medical field are looking to collaborate to achieve more effective results. And Alina Toichubaeva, guided by her experience in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, identified several principles for selecting potential partners.
Technological compatibility is one of the most important factors when entering medtech partnerships. It determines how efficient the processes will be, whether the regulatory framework will be followed, and whether sanitary and health standards will be met. At Labnet Global, a holding company that owns and operates laboratories under different brands locally, Alina Toichubaeva helped enter into partnerships with other medtech companies. She selected those candidates whose molecular testing systems in laboratories suit Labnet Global's needs.
Reputation and strategic fit are also important factors. When Alina worked on the Qomek team, a leading healthcare app in Central Asia, she prioritized partners who understood local healthcare challenges and focused on patient innovation. Consequently, the app incorporated personalized screening recommendations and AI-based health assessment.
To sum up, in order to facilitate MedTech collaboration, prospective partners must work toward mutual respect and trust.
Laying the Foundation: Trust, Transparency, and Shared Vision
Any successful partnership begins with a foundation based on trust and shared objectives. Alina believes that open communication and aligned expectations are essential for long-term results.
In another MedTech company, Alina Toichubaeva proved the effectiveness of work structuring. During her collaboration with Labnet Global, she developed a special plan for working with different partners, for which she implemented several different frameworks. She paid special attention to creating a roadmap. One stage—one goal and objectives. Thus, step by step, foreign colleagues could coordinate all processes and not lose efficiency.
Qomek has become the #1 Healthcare app in Kyrgyzstan and #2 in Kazakhstan, largely due to real-time data sharing and performance reviews. As Alina Toychubaeva notes, this is also an important aspect of collaboration, and partners need to arrange meetings and calls early on to discuss past and future goals.
As strategic partners in MedTech, companies must understand that sharing experiences and data at every, even the smallest, stage is important, since ultimately the teams will share not only the results and successes, but also the responsibility for their product with the future consumer.
Navigating Cross-Border Collaborations and Regulatory Alignment
The 2024 PubMed Central survey makes it clear that the field of international collaboration faces several challenges. First, the framework is set by the structure of the industry itself and the mindset of its workers. Each institution operates according to its own rules and is not always willing to look beyond its financial systems. But without a degree of risk, success cannot be achieved.
In addition, workers face the problem of competing interests. When one organization is more focused on staying ahead of the competition than on the common mission, the spirit of collaboration quickly fades. This can lead to a breakdown in communication and unclear leadership. When roles are not defined, teams can lose direction and projects lose momentum.
Things get even more complicated when governments get involved. Getting approval from them is often slow and unclear, which slows down progress.
Alina Toichubaeva has seen these issues up close during her work in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. One of the issues she highlights is regulatory fragmentation, a problem that often makes harmonization across borders nearly impossible.
Health systems often operate under different standards for device approval, data privacy, clinical validation, and accountability. Alina Toichubaeva created cross-functional regulatory teams to address these challenges and prioritized early dialogue with local governments and health ministries, especially in countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the UAE.
Alina has worked with various digital applications, such as Siroca Technology software for the automation of processes in laboratories and healthcare organizations. Here she was engaged in business development in different regions, focusing on market growth and compliance with international sanitary standards. Siroca managed to establish partnerships with medical organizations, such as DostarMed in Kazakhstan, Vitros Diagnostics, Medik-AS, and Intermed Innovation in Uzbekistan, etc.
Working with the Qomek app also required a lot of responsibility, because the project was going international. Alina facilitated and spearheaded partnerships with medical diagnostic and healthcare organizations, such as Life Medicus, Abai Medicus, Expert Neuro, etc. The app has a number of features that help partner medical centers connect within 24 hours. Largely due to this, 70,000 doctors from Kazakhstan began using the app.
Measuring Success and Scaling the Partnership
Maintaining strategic partnerships requires well-defined success metrics. In medtech, these metrics need to be more than just financial gains.
Here, turnaround time, test accuracy, and general patient satisfaction are the most crucial metrics. Across several projects, Alina has regularly taken the lead in automating lab workflows. Accessibility has increased, patient-centric digital solutions have been introduced, and molecular testing has been modernized through the use of data and technology. This has improved patient outcomes and influenced how quickly doctors make decisions.
Scaling the partnership is the next phase. Alina Toichubaeva concentrated on training programs, workforce development, and modular technology integration. This allowed the achievements to be successfully replicated in new conditions after conducting research into new markets. In projects like Qomek, Alina has applied additional metrics, such as user retention, engagement metrics, and feedback on personalized healthcare tools. Integrating analytics into the app's infrastructure has allowed her team to quickly adapt to user needs and iterate on product features to meet patient expectations.
Toichubaeva believes that partnership development is a methodical process of proving value, building trust at the local level, and adapting innovations to changing priorities of the healthcare system. Only a systematic approach will allow both parties to preserve the initial values of scaling and achieve the desired efficiency.
Conclusion
Creating patient-focused innovations is impossible without well-organized strategic partnerships. Alina Toichubaeva's experience shows that careful selection of partners, open communication, regulatory foresight, and shared responsibility are critical to the success of such partnerships.
Long-term impact is achieved through mutual values and clear goals that move both partners forward. This methodical approach translates aspirations into measurable, long-term results in a global health landscape.
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