Medtech Rises To Challenge Of Meeting Infinite Heath Care Demand With Finite Resources

14 Dec 2018

The relative absence of blockbuster M&A within medtech in 2018, compared with recent years, does not mean that consolidation of the industry – and of providers and payers – will not continue apace in 2019 and beyond. In fact, it is written – if not in the stars then possibly in digital coding – that there will be fewer and bigger entities at the top end of the ecosystem of medtech stakeholders. And rising demand will be met more and more by digital tools and functionalities.

Health care is on a journey to a fully-digitized and personalized diagnostic environment, where health systems can host genomics data and individual family history data, rendering far more precise diagnoses for patients. That is the goal. But health-care systems are under pressure because "we have finite resources but almost infinite demand." So says Neil Mesher, of Royal Philips UK and Ireland.

Mesher was a speaker at the UK ABHI's 30th anniversary event in November 2018, where the consensus was around the...