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Conversation highlights:
- Med Surg Solutions customizes strategies for different healthcare authorities, aligning with their specific objectives to improve the healthcare ecosystem.
- The company takes 18 months to properly integrate employees, focusing on clinical education and surgery techniques.
- Rather than traditional distribution, MSS positions itself as a trustworthy partner that fills clinical needs through innovation, education, and proper communication.
- Patient outcomes drive all business decisions, with 60% of commercial team bonuses based on input quality rather than sales output.
- The company has developed a socioeconomic approach to a medical intervention program to help healthcare professionals improve departmental services and recycle the dysfunctions in hospitals.
- Over 20 years, MSS has consistently improved patient lives daily across different hospitals and departments in the 21 regions in KSA, GCC, and Lebanon.
EF: Can you tell us about your background and what inspired you to start Med Surg Solutions in 2005?
FM: Twenty years ago, through my ten years working at one of the biggest companies in minimally invasive surgery, I realized there was a need for someone to do what I did personally to transform the company. We had a unique situation where our surgical department business accounted for 80% of the business in Saudi Arabia, while our major competitor accounted for only 20%, even though globally it was the other way around. I initially thought this success was about me personally, but I discovered it wasn't about me; it was about the value of what I do. With everything I did, I improved patient lives, be it through education, clinical solutions, or just communication. We don't sell products; we provide clinical advantages of medical solutions and technologies and communicate them properly with healthcare professionals. We find the right solution for specific needs in the short, medium, and long term, and we keep regenerating these solutions. There was no one doing what I did at that time, not even within my own company. I was an exception, taking the initiative in training and education that others weren't willing to do.
EF: How do you choose your partners, and why remain hyper-specialized in operating theaters and the ICU?
FM: Most important is your team; they're the ones giving the different services, whether educational, technical assistance, supply chain, or forecasting. We position ourselves as a link between global improvements and the local market, understanding both the operating theater and ICU on one hand, and the healthcare professionals’ needs on the other. Healthcare professionals work with checklists and routines, but we currently have too much data, too many products, and too many representatives. They need a trustworthy partner whom they can share their challenges and identify areas for improvement with, and who will help them achieve their goals. I'm not looking to add more distributors; I might even reduce by one if a product becomes a commodity with no value to end users.
I'm not here to distribute; I'm here to build solutions that deliver value, and I price according to what I find convenient. The selection of solutions depends on the needs of the hospital, the healthcare professionals, and the patients. How does this clinically improve the patient's life, in terms of hospital stay, pain management, mortality, and morbidity during the operation? We choose all solutions that align with this direction, and we aggressively market them through the right people. Over time, you build this forum around you where customers understand that whatever you hold represents value for patients.
Our sustained focus on operating theatres and ICUs allows us to continually enhance our value proposition and scale our impact, drawing on our long‑standing experience and know‑how.
EF: What kind of people do you need, and how do you build talent within the organization?
FM: I need people who follow the company values. All our HR and recruitment phases go in this direction. I need someone who is a learner and who consistently enjoys learning. We bring people with a humanitarian approach to business. If people don't care about the humanitarian side, I cannot have them on the team. For example, we expect them to be available around the clock for urgent patient cases. Not because I want them to be flexible, but because patients want them to be flexible, specifically when dealing with life-saving or urgent situations.
I position myself willingly as part of the surgical team. First, they need to communicate in English, so we train them in anatomy, physiology, and surgical technology to ensure they pass these tests. Then we start field training and gradually bring them into each operation until they adapt to the whole process. It takes 18 months to properly integrate employees because of the nature of our model: you're dealing with people's lives way beyond mere sales. The people we train cannot easily transfer their skills to other companies because we work uniquely. I don't bring people with lots of experience because we suffer from them; it takes time to untrain them, and sometimes I can't make it work. I want to work with people who share our values, our humanitarian approach, willingness to learn, and long-term commitment, regardless of their years of experience. You give them stability, and they give you everything, most importantly, with ethics at the forefront.
EF: Looking back over 20 years, what are your proudest achievements?
FM: What keeps me every day in this business is when I see patients improving and when we save lives. I can tell you that every single day we improve patients' lives and save lives, amounting to thousands of patients per year. This is the proudest thing I have ever done. When you're in finance, money can always be made differently. You can play at a certain level with stocks, IPOs; these things are doable. But to be able to do it consistently for more than twenty years, every day, reaching more patients in different areas, different categories, different hospitals, different departments, and fighting for that with healthcare professionals to improve patient well-being—this is what makes me get up every day. This is what I fight for every day, and it is worth the fight: the scale of patients we have served and the lasting impact we have made on the lives we touched.
EF: How do you measure success?
FM: When you deal with government on a large scale with such responsibility as being part of the clinical system, I don't believe you should measure people on output because output is not controlled; it depends on budgets and different factors. What you can control is the input and its quality. Our people are focused on input, so 60% of our commercial team's bonuses and packages are based on their input in the market. My research in business shows that my input here in the office, when speaking with my sales manager, improved patients' lives in the hospital. Whatever I do, giving input here that goes to the hospital, the output is patient outcomes. My products have value for patients, my educational activities have value for patients and healthcare professionals, my technical training does this, and my forecasting does this. Closing gaps across all these fronts is actually the input that I provide, reflected in the side of patient outcomes. We target inputs because we know that once the output is patient outcomes, we're going to get the reward. Our reward is always what we do for the patient, and our success story is not financial. We even eliminated traditional commissions or bonuses; we call it a value-based percentage in our books. Finance is not in people's heads; it's about what we do. We created a program called the socioeconomic approach to medical intervention that helps people improve services in their department while putting the human potential and core mission at the essence of improvement. Most managerial positions in healthcare are held by doctors without business backgrounds, so this research-backed program helps them improve patient welfare from a socioeconomic perspective.
EF: How does Med Surg Solutions approach value creation in the healthcare market?
DFM: Our value proposition centers on localized strategies built around core training, education, and product offerings from different companies. We believe deeply in the fundamental value of these activities and products, which is why our strategy is very much localized around core value principles. This approach allows us to create meaningful impact by focusing on what truly matters to our specific markets and customer needs.
We view value co‑creation as extending far beyond individual products—by combining complementary solutions and investing deeply in hospital education, we enhance outcomes and elevate the quality of patient care.
EF: What is your perspective on innovation in the medical field?
DFM: Innovation in medicine is fundamentally different from other industries. It's very difficult to bring something truly revolutionary to market. The kind of transformative innovation that happened with products like the iPhone is rare in medicine because we operate in a conservative environment. Instead, we embrace what I call incremental innovation. We keep adding to our solutions here and there, so our value proposition becomes more comprehensive and effective as we move forward. This approach recognizes that sustainable progress in healthcare often comes through systematic improvements rather than dramatic breakthroughs- so we pursue continuous, incremental enhancements in our products and services, complemented by technological and procedural innovation that advances our value proposition in the medical field.
EF: How do you make strategic decisions at MSS?
DFM: Everything we do is based on research and studies. My academic background significantly influences this approach, so there's always something substantive I believe in to back our decisions. However, I also recognize that business involves a lot of intuition, and intuition connects deeply with subconscious processes. Frankly speaking, I don't always know what triggers certain decisions, but I trust my intuition because I believe it is grounded in meaningful drive, even if I can't always articulate it in the moment.
In parallel, we ensure our strategies are closely aligned with national agendas, while continuously scanning the market for emerging technologies and actively incorporating feedback from our teams. Our strategy remains dynamic and iterative, shaped by our proximity to where we create the greatest impact—particularly in operating theatres, intensive care units, and dialysis centers.
