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Emerging markets are likely to spur the “next frontier in medical innovation”, engineers at Cambridge Consultants have said.
Speaking at the firm's innovation showcase, Rahul Sathe, principal mechanical engineer, and Leslie Johnston, senior human factors engineer, Cambridge Consultants, said China and India provided the greatest growth opportunities for medical device technology. “Hospitals are rapidly expanding in tier one and tier two cities in India and China,” Sathe said.
These markets presented unique challenges, with overcrowded and understaffed hospitals. Spending on healthcare was about 5% if GDP in China, compared to 17% in the US. But there were 30,000 new rural healthcare centres under development in China. Companies such as GE were tapping into the market by developing low cost, portable ECG devices, available for $600. They had to be easy to use, and easy to train on, Johnston said.
Access to such technology was disproportionately skewed toward urban areas in developing markets, he added. For example, 70% of India’s population lived in rural areas but 60% of hospitals were in cities. Only about 25% of the population had health insurance. Paediatric instruments for the Indian market had to be designed for smaller children with lower birth weights. “Even the smallest surgical instruments designed for Western markets may be too large,” Johnston said.
Engineers from Cambridge Consultants recently spent two weeks observing 13 laparoscopic procedures in India. This surgery, also called minimally invasive surgery, bandaid surgery, or keyhole surgery, is a modern surgical technique in which operations are performed far from their location through small incisions (usually 0.5–1.5 cm) elsewhere in the body.
Some purpose-built facilities such as ten-bed clinics owned by surgeons were emerging in India in rural areas to expand local endoscopy, dialysis and cardiac treatment in addition to the services provided by hospitals. Surgical planning in emerging markets such as India could be poor, Sathe said, with nurses only finding out which procedures they were assisting on on the day of the operation. “Emerging markets are home to some of the best surgeons in the world - and also some of the most inexperienced.”
The challenge for engineers was to design low-cost, efficient medical devices that could be adopted and trained on quickly and easily, bearing in mind local conditions. For example, there is a shortage of surgical simulators in India and cadavers are only available for government-run institutions, Johnston told
PE. “In most hospitals, critical care equipment is scarce.”
Government body UK Trade and Investment, which backs British exporters, is taking 12 life sciences firms on a trade mission to China this winter.