(Source: the economist)I’ve just received the last quarter results of venture capital healthcare investments, and I really love what I see (venture deal reports). Medical device companies received the most funding out of the four sectors (medical devices, services, biotech and pharma), edging out biotechnology. Minimally invasive procedures and implantable diagnostic sensors were particularly attractive to venture medical-device investors during the last year.
Medical devices are becoming more and more interesting for investors, as they deliver real value, real soon (time to market is significantly closer than in biotech investments). But this is not only about today. The long term trends look promising as well, as the confluence of genomics, nanotechnology and high-speed computing will make possible more elaborate devices. In an ageing population, the demand for medical technology will grow relentlessly.
Now we just have to solve the underlying problem. The emergence, adoption and widespread diffusion of new medical technologies accounts for a great deal of healthcare increasing costs. Who is going to pay for this in the future?
Medical devices are becoming more and more interesting for investors, as they deliver real value, real soon (time to market is significantly closer than in biotech investments). But this is not only about today. The long term trends look promising as well, as the confluence of genomics, nanotechnology and high-speed computing will make possible more elaborate devices. In an ageing population, the demand for medical technology will grow relentlessly.
Now we just have to solve the underlying problem. The emergence, adoption and widespread diffusion of new medical technologies accounts for a great deal of healthcare increasing costs. Who is going to pay for this in the future?
1 comments:
About increasing on costs derived from new biomedical technologies...
Last week I went to a nice encounter with Iona Heath, a opinion leader within the UK's GPs community.
She talks (powerpoint) about the Beveridge falacy.
In 1942, when UK decided to start the NHS the Beveridge Report stated that the NHS (with prevention and care actions) will improve the health of the population so in the future the costs will get down as less people will require those services.
Roberts, just few years later 1949, published in BMJ a letter where he said:
"all the official predictions are totally unreliable - (1) because they ignore the effect of the ageing of the population, (2) because they ignore the intrinsically expansile nature of hospital practice, and (3) because they are based on a false conception of health and disease".
Most people thinks about healthcare innovation assuming the Beveridge falacy (that is 60 years old and have been largely refuted by the history).
The question is: "new technologies = higher costs"? always?
Healthcare costs has a limit (that is far away from 100% of GDP of course) so in some point (have we reach it?) there will be only place to real disruptive innovations (under the Christensen definition) that get the costs low by providing less-complex but same-effective solutions.
Take a look to a paper from Iona
Global capitalist hegemony is opening up the whole arena of human health for the pursuit of profit, trading on human fear in an explicit and calculated manner. People living in the wealthy countries of the world are now living healthier and longer lives than ever before. Only a minority are sick, and so the profit to be made by developing and selling treatments for the sick is limited. There is much more money to be made by convincing the healthy majority of the immediacy of threats to their health and the need to take action to avert or minimize these threats.
An obsession with health is destructive of it.1 The more people are exposed to the machinations of contemporary health care, the more they perceive themselves to be sick or at risk and the higher the rates of self-reported illness.2 With the widespread expectation of a long and healthy life, fear is transmuted into greed and an ever-greater appetite for consuming health care resources at the expense of poorer and sicker people, both globally and locally. The largely unexamined conviction that “prevention is better than cure” provides a moral justification for the systematic diversion of health care resources from the sick to the healthy. The economic imperatives of the pharmaceutical industry drive the rhetoric and orchestrate ever-increasing demands for health care technologies.
Post a Comment