A joint replacement is judged in a patient's kitchen three weeks after surgery, so I treat the implant, its instruments and the recovery programme as one product.
A product decision in orthopaedics outlives the people who make it. An implant may stay in a patient for twenty years, and a recovery screen may be read by someone who is sore, tired and alone at home. I try to decide what we will support for that long, what we will stop selling, and what we should never ask a patient to interpret without a clinician.
Luca Duvall
Group revenue
€212m
2025; hip and knee implants, instruments and recovery software
Hospitals using the recovery app
96
About 18,400 patients enrolled each year
Product colleagues
74
Product management, human factors and digital recovery
Leadership, seen by others.
Luca came to our gym on a Tuesday morning and watched patients use the app before he asked us anything. When we said we could not run two recovery pathways, he did not tell us to try harder. He changed the product.
Annelien BruggemaereHead of physiotherapy, Scheldemeer General Hospital
He brings a withdrawal plan to the risk review with the same care as a launch plan. When the messaging audit came in, he did not wait for my team to tell him the feature had to change.
Marieke OostervinckDirector of quality and regulatory affairs, Merlicourt Orthopaedics
Luca tells the executive committee what a product will cost us over its whole life, including the parts commercial colleagues would rather not hear. Our board trusts his portfolio papers because the losses are listed first.
I judge a joint-replacement product by the recovery it supports at home, including the products and features we choose to stop offering.
I am chief product officer of Merlicourt Orthopaedics, a family-controlled Belgian manufacturer of hip and knee replacement implants, surgical instruments and a recovery app that hospitals give patients after joint surgery. We employ 1,040 people, sell in nineteen European countries and reported €212 million revenue in 2025. I lead 74 colleagues in product management, human-factors design and the digital recovery team, with a 2025 development budget of €14.6 million. Implant engineering reports to our chief technology officer, and quality and regulatory affairs report to the chief executive. I want that separation kept.
I trained as a mechanical engineer and spent my first working years in Grenoble designing the instruments surgeons use to cut bone and seat an implant. Watching a surgeon struggle with a cutting guide in a demonstration theatre taught me that a well-specified product can still be a poor one in the hands that use it. I have since managed hip systems in Turin and knee systems in Namur, and in 2018 I led the launch of our recovery app, which now supports about 18,400 patients a year in 96 hospitals.
The decisions on this site involve removal as often as addition. We declined to recertify an older knee system under the EU Medical Device Regulation, ended free-text messaging in the app when we found messages nobody was reading, and opened the recovery programme to patients who had received another manufacturer's implant. Each choice cost revenue, goodwill or a sales argument. Surgeons, physiotherapists and our regulatory colleagues settled the clinical questions; my job was to decide what we would build, support and withdraw, and to explain why to the people affected.
A legacy knee withdrawn over thirty months
Recertifying a 2004 knee system was estimated at €3.1 million against €7.4 million of declining annual sales. We withdrew it, trained 52 surgeons on alternatives and kept supplying what patients already implanted might need.
412 unread messages ended a feature
An audit found 412 patient messages unread after 72 hours across 23 hospitals. We replaced open messaging with structured daily questions that send worrying answers to each hospital's own telephone line and worklist.
Recovery-app hospitals rose from 61 to 96
Once we opened the programme to patients with any manufacturer's implant and charged €38 per episode, physiotherapy departments could run a single pathway. We gave up an exclusive tender argument to get there.
Current focus
I am reviewing which of our 31 hip and knee instrument trays can be simplified before the next certification cycle, with theatre nurses counting what is actually opened, cleaned and resterilised during an ordinary operating list.
Conversations I welcome
I would consider one non-executive role with a European medtech, digital-health or elective-care company, at first about twenty-four days a year, once our chair and chief executive have reviewed overlaps with our customers, suppliers and competitors.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Diplôme d'ingénieur, mechanical engineeringInstitut polytechnique de Morvessan · 1998
I would consider one non-executive role with a European medtech, digital-health or elective-care company, at first about twenty-four days a year, once our chair and chief executive have reviewed overlaps with our customers, suppliers and competitors.
