Environmental Scan 2017: Human Capital Issues within the Medical Devices Sector
Benchmarked Countries
Description
The medical device sector employs more than 400,000
Americans and indirectly involves close to 2 million
employees.
Despite being the largest MedDev market, nearly 80% of
the 6,500 medical devices companies in US are SMEs
Challenges
In the US, 75% of the total medical devices development
cost is spent on clearing regulatory hurdles.
One of the key challenge that Medical Devices companies
in the US is about to face is the reintroduction of the
Medical Device Excise Tax in 2018. This would require
medical device manufacturers to pay 2.3% in excise tax.
Promotion
In the US, a lot of effort is spent in organizing marketing
platforms via a strong collaboration between members of
the medical academy and industry associations.
o During these marketing platforms, the organizers
also organizes conferences, facilitation of idea
platforms and providing networking platforms for
all members of the medical devices industry.
o One very reputable and engaging event is
TEDMED. During the TEDMED event in 2016, 24
Hive entrepreneurs took the stage for the first
time in a new session called “Audacious”, sharing
how their visionary thinking and innovations are
affecting change across health and medicine
Talent Development Initiative
Within the talent space, some of the initiatives that were
observed in the US include:
o MEDTECH Innovator - MedTech Innovator is the
industry’s nonprofit global competition and
accelerator for medical device, digital health and
diagnostic companies. MedTech Innovator unites
the leading players within the MedTech
innovation ecosystem. The program helps
accelerate growth of companies by awarding the
winner and exposing them to industry leaders in
the competition
o Funding through student internship programs –
An examples is the Iowa Student Internship
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