Overview

Increasing budgetary pressures across all health systems is causing downward pressures on operational and capital budgets across all program areas. Centralised procurement has been positioned as a major player in reducing costs and generating savings, which has transformed the selling world of the medical technology companies to a transactional, commodity based process. The call for “value for money” has rung out loud from health systems and health systems’ procurement but scratching the surface of this concept reveals that most systems are not able to define, implement, measure or harvest “value”. Now, there is also the growing demand for “risk-sharing agreements.” The question at hand is “is the medical technology industry prepared to meet these challenges?”.