Medtech Nears its Golden Age Focusing on Value-based Care

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The key medtech industry challenges of lack of innovation in conventional segments, the evolution of GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) and other non-traditional participants, has led to certain industry moves broadly classified into increasing personalization, data and tech leverage, enhanced post-acute care coordination and an increasing focus on value-based care models. Furthermore, Asia-Pacific, driven by the rising adoption of emerging technologies in countries like Japan, China, Singapore, and India, is creating a key growth region and is set to account for one-fourth of the global market by 2019 and overtake Europe as the second-largest market by 2022.

“Patient centricity is a major theme for the medtech industry, with focus continuing to develop around key areas of patient safety, monitoring, engagement, and care coordination—but this time empowered with digital tools, and focusing on newer areas of growth,” said Sowmya Rajagopalan, Advanced Medical Technologies Global Director. “Patient safety, for instance, which traditionally involves areas such as surgical site infections, is now expanding the scope to cover diagnostics safety, pressure ulcers and preventing unnecessary emergency department admissions. These newer focus areas are expected to grow at a 14.7% CAGR until 2024.”

Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Global Medical Technologies Industry Predictions, 2019, comprehensively analyzes a set of 20 such growth opportunities cutting across these themes, with a combined incremental value of $64.10 billion, over and above the $413.90 billion traditional market size, in 2019. The estimates further peg the longer-term growth opportunity to be $173.06 billion by 2024, with a healthy CAGR of 22.0% compared to the traditional market, which is estimated to slow down from the current 5.8% to around 5.2% by 2024.

“The medtech industry has been challenged by the lack of innovation in conventional segments, increasing focus on efficiencies, changing device ecosystem to digital enablers, and rising domestic competition in certain growth markets,” noted Rajagopalan. “This has resulted in a series of industry strategies broadly classified into increasing personalization, data and tech leverage, enhanced post-acute care coordination, and a focus on value-based care models.”

Top medtech companies are adopting the following strategies to tap growth opportunities:

• Focus on smartphone-based solutions, as they present a $2.11 billion opportunity by 2020. Technologies such as AI, machine learning, AR/VR, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data analytics, coupled with existing smartphone tools like cameras and external sensors, are transforming smartphones into powerful and cost-effective diagnostic tools.
• Offer Software-as-a-Medical-Device (SaMD). These will become the building blocks of platforms of care aimed at holistic solutions for diagnosis, surgery, surgical navigation, treatment planning, and disease management.
• Improve care-coordination and information exchange for patients to enhance their outcomes. Medtech companies are building risk-sharing contracts that are enabled only by data-sharing models, to understand the role of vendor solutions in care and outcomes management as a part of the overall strategy to become partners with hospitals.
• Properly define the endpoints and measurement criteria to prevent disease adjacencies.
• Foster partnerships with smart home ecosystem participants to aid early diagnosis and disease management and hence, ensure better outcomes.

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