PwC: U.S. maintains lead in med tech--but for how long?
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While the U.S. is expected to maintain its leadership for the foreseeable future, even a narrowing of the gap has implications for U.S. jobs, exports and Americans' access to advances in medical technology, according to the New York City-based company.
PwC analyzed the specific factors that contribute to medical technology innovation and quantified them, using 86 different metrics to evaluate how well each nation promotes the factors that advance innovation. The nine nations evaluated were Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
A top-level view of current results revealed:
- On a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 as the highest score, the U.S. currently has a total score of 7.1 and is the global leader in medical technology innovation. Because of decades of innovation dominance, the U.S. continues to show the greatest capacity for medical technology innovation.
- The scores of the other developed nations (the U.K., Germany, Japan and France) fall within a tight band of 4.8 to 5.4. Among the developed countries included in this study, Germany and the U.K. demonstrate the strongest support for innovation and Japan the weakest.
- Israel, despite its small size, ranks near the level of the European nations, which indicates its strong capacity to foster innovation.
- The emerging markets lag behind developed ones. China, with its powerful economic growth engine, scores 3.4, ranking it higher than India and Brazil, each of which scored 2.7.
“By contrast, China, India and Brazil are likely to see gains during the coming decade,” the authors wrote. “China, which has shown the largest improvement in its medical technology innovative capacity during the past five years, is expected to continue to outpace other countries and reach near-parity with the developed nations of Europe by 2020.”
The report also indicated that the innovation ecosystem itself is moving offshore as the nature of medical technology innovation evolves. “Some of this transformation is being driven by changes in the U.S., such as more expensive, less-predictable FDA regulatory approvals, an increased focus on value and cost-effective solutions in healthcare and increasingly international investments in research and development.
"Other dynamics are the result of changes abroad, including factors as diverse as investment in local academic medical centers; investment in research programs; the return of foreign-educated scientists and doctors to their homelands and advancement of mobile health technologies that expand access to care.”
As a result of these factors, medical technology companies increasingly are going outside the U.S. to seek clinical data, new-product registration and first revenue, PwC stated. Accordingly, U.S. consumers are not always the first to benefit from advances in medical technology and could eventually be among the last to gain access to new innovation. Medical technology innovators already are going first to market in Europe and, by 2020, likely will move into emerging countries before entering the U.S., the report concluded.
The shift away from the U.S. to nations such as China, India and Brazil is not necessarily preordained, the company remarked. "Factors related to intellectual property protection, difficulty of doing business in some emerging countries and weak local supplier networks could make these markets less attractive, despite their size, and could hinder these nations' effort to assume innovation leadership."