While Europe is attractive for its innovative medical technology research ecosystem, its efficient and accessible healthcare system, and its growing efforts towards value-based healthcare, it has work to do to retain its historic place as the global ‘epicenter’ of medical technology innovation.
One of Europe’s many strengths is its unrivalled innovation creation. The medical technology sector in Europe files a patent every 30 minutes: this is a testament to the commitment of the medtech sector to save lives and help people manage and improve their health. At the same time, Europe faces the challenge of bridging its top-tier innovation creation and an often (too) slow innovation launch. Coupled with tough competition from other regions of the world, Europe’s international competitiveness gap is widening.
In addition, severe underfunding, problematic reimbursement, slow value-based procurement adoption and austerity schemes threaten access to and quality of healthcare. At the same time, downward pricing pressures, clawback schemes and other operational issues, such as chronic late invoice payments etc., can have major long-term impact.
MedTech Europe calls for the acknowledgment of the strategic relevance of the medical technology sector for health, EU prosperity and competitiveness.
In the light of the Draghi Competitiveness Report, we recommend closing imminent innovation launch gaps through:
- A structural reform of the sector’s regulatory system set via Regulations (EU) 2017/745 and 2017/746
- A better synchronisation of regulatory requirements across different policy domains to boost investor confidence: insufficient synchronisation today causes legal uncertainty, fragmentation of the internal market, regulatory and administrative burden.
- Earmarking strategic investments in more efficient, sustainable healthcare systems, supported by digital health and medical technologies to reduce the cost of care and help secure Europe’s position as a global leader in healthcare innovation and Europe’s wider sustainability and digitalisation ambitions.
- Implementing value-based procurement and a joint decarbonisation and competitiveness to align Europe’s environmental and economic goals.
Future innovation in medical technologies can help relieve health systems and workforce burden, prevent more effectively, diagnose better and earlier, treat to save more lives and relieve financial strains on public health and social welfare. Such innovations can appear through optimisation of existing technologies as well as through groundbreaking, breakthrough and disruptive technologies. As such, it is important that Europe has strong investment in R&D, has a robust innovation pipeline and offers an attractive market for medical technologies.
MedTech Europe, on behalf of the medical technology industry, stands ready to leverage the #PowerOfMedtech in transforming lives and healthcare ecosystems, in order to support Europe’s sustainable prosperity and competitiveness for the future.
