MedTech Winners of 2013: Patients

Patients
While the medical device industry was fretting over the implementation of the medical device tax and the great unknown of value-based healthcare, patients had a pretty banner year. In addition to gaining access to a number of innovative products that entered the market this year, patients benefitted from a deluge of medical, health, and wellness apps to help them manage conditions ranging from diabetes to the newly anointed disease, obesity. The era of Big Data has also begun, which should ultimately help patients. "Clear and away the biggest winners in all of healthcare including medtech are patients," says James S. Varelis, principal at PwC pharmaceuticals and life sciences. "They are benefitting from the increasing focus on consumers from all stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem, new relationships and business models that are forming across the heath space, and the emphasis on improved health outcomes and quality. When we have medical device companies like pacemaker manufacturers extending their reach beyond just the device to include monitoring and patient outreach, the end result is better customer satisfaction and better patient outcomes, both of which are now also important factors for medtech reimbursement. That’s a win-win all around."