Medical Equipment Industry

Medical Equipment Industry

Industry Defined:

Medical equipment (also known as armamentarium) is designed to aid in the diagnosis, monitoring or treatment of medical conditions (Wikipidia).

There are several basic types for Medical equipment, 

• Diagnostic equipment includes medical imaging machines, used to aid in diagnosis. Examples are ultrasound and MRI machines, PET and CT scanners, and x-ray machines.
• Treatment equipment includes infusion pumps, medical lasers and LASIK surgical machines.
• Life support equipment is used to maintain a patient's bodily function. This includes medical ventilators, anesthetic machines, heart-lung machines, ECMO, and dialysis machines.
• Medical monitors allow medical staff to measure a patient's medical state. Monitors may measure patient vital signs and other parameters including ECG, EEG, and blood pressure.
• Medical laboratory equipment automates or helps analyze blood, urine, genes, and dissolved gases in the blood.
• Diagnostic Medical Equipment may also be used in the home for certain purposes, e.g. for the control of diabetes mellitus
• Therapeutic: physical therapy machines like continuous passive range of motion (CPM) machines

The impact of globalization

The Globalization gives a great impact on the medical equipment industry. Globalization has greatly increased the demand for medical technology. The globalization of design, sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, and sales of medical technology has accelerated the transformation of the Med-Tech industry; the emergence of new economies as key marketplaces for the sale of medical devices has given executives pause as they consider how to serve these markets as well as the developed economies that have long been the principal revenue drivers for their companies. Moreover, these concerns are emerging just as the industry’s business model shifts from “selling products” to “providing integrated solutions” that improve care and enhance health across populations.

Industry Profile:

A need for change:

Increasing design re-use and partner collaboration
Integrated access, analysis, mgmt & reporting of trials data
Standardized, electronically managed policies & procedures
Targeted, coordinated mktg to consumers & physicians

Lean initiatives to reduce cycle time and waste

Tsing hua tian di is a medical equipment company in China, and the company is producing DR and some other medical equipment， the company decided to change its strategy to focus on not only its product but also the customer service and international business since the opportunities and impact of globalization. 

Business model 

source: Source: SYK 10K & Investor Presentation  Williams Balsamo February, 18, 2015

Reference:

Medical Technology Industry Faces a Balancing Act in Globalization, By Manufacturing Geek on November 29, 2012

http://manufacturing-geek.com/medical-devices/2012/11/medical-technology-industry-faces-balancing-act-globalization/

Industry Analysis for Mobile Health

The Mobile health has a lot of opportunities now and will increase more in the future. According to the PwC and GSMA report, Touching lives through mobile health: Assessment of the global market opportunity, global mHealth revenues will increase nearly six-fold by 2017, with monitoring services and applications representing 65% of the market. Based on this finding, mHealth has the potential to make a great impact on the healthcare industry, yet organisations are still uncertain on how to capitalist on the technology. (PwC's Official Website) 

The situation now is that the regions and market segments mHealth will have the most impact, different market segments will gave great impact for this industry and will also change companies' strategy to fit in different market. 

     Source: Ralf-Gordon Jahns, 10 November 2010, "500m People will be using health care mobile applications in 2015"

Three Trends that already in society

Ageing population

Ageing populations and chronic illness are driving regulatory reform. Public sector healthcare is seeking better access and quality, and it's looking to the private sector for innovation and efficiency. mHealth improves access and quality, and offers dramatic innovation and cost reduction.

Foundations already in place

The foundations of industrialization of healthcare are already in place — electronic medical records, remote monitoring and communications. ‘Care anywhere’ is already emerging. The platform for mHealth is set.

Personalisation

Healthcare, like other industries, is getting personal. mHealth can offer personal toolkits for predictive, participatory and preventative care.

The emerging economics developing very fast these years, and it will be a great market for mHealth industry. In the emerging markets surveyed, patient awareness and expectations

of mHealth are, on average, far higher than in developed countries (see the following two charts) More important, far more patients are already using mHealth:59% of emerging-market patients use at least one mHealth application or service, compared with 35% in the developed world, and among those who do not, emerging-market residents are more interested in starting. 

New approaches to the delivery of care abound. In Mexico, for example, a telephone-based health care advice and triage service is available to more than one million subscribers and their families for $5 a month, paid through phone bills. In India, an entrepreneur has proved that high-quality, no-frills maternity care can be provided for one-fifth of the price charged by the country’s other private providers. In New York City, the remote monitoring of chronically ill elderly patients has reduced their rate of hospital admissions by about 40 percent. (McKinsey's Official Website)

As a emerging economic country, China will be a large market  for mHealth industry. After I graduated from my college in US, I went back to China in 2012, and I can feel the developing other than economics. People started to care about their health more than before and also for their next generation. From organic food to mobile health equipment, people increased their awareness for all the things good for health. 

However, other than the great opportunities, this industry also have some threats. The most important one is the products, and products need innovation.  Unfortunately, health care can be an isolated and local activity: innovations are not widely known across different systems or beyond sector boundaries. Merely identifying and promoting innovations isn’t enough, however—leaders need to understand whether, and how, the lessons of innovators can be replicated elsewhere.    

Source: Emerging mHealth: Paths for growth. www.pwc.com/mhealth. Economist Intelligence Unite,2012

 

Source: Emerging mHealth: Paths for growth. www.pwc.con/mhealth. Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012

• Barbara, Ciamataro and others. (2012) Mobile Technology Consumption, Opportunities and Challenges. Ferris State University, USA.
• In collaboration with tmngglobal and csmg, March, 2010. Mobile Technology’s Promise for Healthcare 
• www.pwc.com
• www.mckinsey.com
• Emerging mHealth: Paths for growth. www.pwc.com/mhealth. Economist Intelligence Unite,2012

How friendster lost its opportunities

How friendster lost its opportunities

 Technology developing very fast, and all the industries competing with each other every day. This is the situation now. The fail of friendster in US was not by chance; it was inevitable. Friendster lost its competitive power and market in US and only has market in Asia now. We all know that Friendster has a good start and it is the beginner of social network website industry. What opportunities does Friendster has at the beginning?   

· Customize  

· Technology developing 

· Product flexibility

· User spread 

· Google’s buy purchase

These are the main opportunities that Friendster supposed to have when it started. As the first social network website, Friendster could design to be more customize to let the users feel fun about the website. It should kept developing its technology to help customers feel more convenience when they were online.  Never miss the importance of spreading information. As a social network website, the most important point for Friendster was to get more and more users and let them active, then the users would introduced the website to their friends. 

 However,this is how friendster looks like now, it is totally different and it is no longer a social network website now.  Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but — burdened by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook — it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006.(THE FRIENDSTER AUTOPSY: HOW A SOCIAL NETWORK DIES)   


 All the opportunities that Friendster should had become to its threat. Friendster was customized but it became to a problem—customer misuse. Users not just created their own pages but also for their pets, which messed up the website. Deal with the same situation,facebook allowed third party apps alike catbook and dogbook to help their customers more convenience to create pages for their pets. . 


 The technology became friendster’s weakness, in two years, Friendster could not wide its thinking and did not develop any useful and convenient technology such as the “group” section that we all know facebook has it today. In 2003, Google planed to buy Friendster and developed some new strategies, but Friendster did not catch that chance.
By 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.(THE FRIENDSTER AUTOPSY: HOW A SOCIAL NETWORK DIES). You can see the following out of Friendster in this diagram:

All the opportunities that Friendster supposed to have become to its threats and weakness, and at the end lead it to die.       

References:

ROBERT MCMILLAN BUSINESS  02.27.13 THE FRIENDSTER AUTOPSY: HOW A SOCIAL NETWORK DIES

http://www.friendster.com

FEATURING MIKE FISHER, AUGUST 1,2013
Ain't Misbehavin: How Encouraging Product "Misuse" Helped Facebook Beat Friendster    

The opportunity for friendster

The opportunity for friendster 

Technology developing super fast, and all the industries competing with each other everyday. This is the situation now. The fail of friendster in US was not by chance; it was inevitable. Friendster lost its competitive power and market in US, but now it has a large market in Asia. The opportunity for frendster now is to find its particular market and strategy. 

l Asia market 

l Partner

l Youth/ teenagers 

l Living the game 

These four points are the main opportunity of friendster. Since Asia is the main market now, friendster should focus on this market and try to find special strategy to fit in this market. Why Asian more likely to use friendster? How to improve the satisfaction of Asian customers? Frienster can also think about corporate with Asia local company such as Tencent to enter into China market. Different from facebook, friendster decided to target at teenagers from 18 to 30 years old. What will be the most important part of a social network site for the young customers? Younger people and teenagers are creative and easy to accept new things, and they are also the main customers of game. So that the next opportunity of friendster will be focus on online games. “ living the game” is friendster’s slogan in the future, which they can focus on more new and creative games to attract teenagers.