Insights Topic
Attribution for medical device and DME revenue
Why revenue in this category resists measurement, and what actually fixes it.
Marketing attribution is a solved problem in categories where the person who clicks is the person who buys. Medical device and DME is not one of those categories, and most of the tooling sold into it was designed for one that is.
Why does attribution break specifically in this category?
Three structural features do the damage. Deals close through distributors, so the transaction record carries a partner’s name rather than the buyer’s. Buying committees include clinical and financial roles that never touch a tracked channel. And education cycles run long enough that the first meaningful touch falls outside any default attribution window.
None of these are tracking failures. Every one of them is a data-model failure, which is why buying a better tracking tool so rarely changes the number.
What does a defensible attribution model look like here?
It reconciles to the same revenue records finance uses, and it survives the handoff to a channel partner. Concretely: a durable demand identity created at first touch, joined to the transaction record rather than replaced by it, with channel-sourced and partner-originated pipeline reported as separate populations.
Anything that cannot be reconciled against finance’s numbers is a marketing report, not an attribution model. The distinction matters the first time someone asks marketing to defend its budget in a room that includes the CFO.
What gets published under this topic?
Analysis of the public data that describes how this market actually transacts — supplier enrolment files, payment disclosures, clearance records — alongside the specs and taxonomies that make a device manufacturer’s own data usable. The recurring question is whether a given number would survive an audit, because in this category it eventually has to.
Everything published on this
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Ledger
Which specialties do device manufacturers actually invest in?
Orthopaedic surgery takes 35.4 percent of device-related payments in the 2025 Open Payments file, but 75.3 percent of that is royalties and licences. Strip out royalties, licences, acquisitions and debt forgiveness and cardiology nearly draws level. Orthopaedics and cardiology together hold 27.0 percent of engagement spend, and cardiology receives the most individual payments.
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Build
A UTM schema for manufacturers selling through distributors
Standard UTM tagging breaks in distributor channels because it forces the partner, the rep, the territory and the funding source into five fields built for one advertiser. This schema keeps utm_source to a closed list of platforms and adds six channel parameters, so co-op spend, rep-shared links and portal traffic each report cleanly.
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Ledger
How many DMEPOS suppliers actually serve each state?
Far more than are based there. In 2024 Medicare data, the median state had 275 CPAP rental suppliers, from 66 in Hawaii to 1086 in Florida. But the average CPAP supplier drew orders from 4.04 states, and 7.65 for oxygen concentrators, so a state supplier count mostly measures suppliers reaching in from elsewhere.