Dear All,
There is probably more money spent on consumables (subset of medical devices) and reagents (IVD devices) than on medical equipment.
Medical devices represent a budget probably smaller than but comparable ( same order of magnitude) to the medicines budget in health care.
Medical devices are said to be growing faster than pharma but in my opinion statistics on device sales are extremely poor in many countries.
I am rather confused by the discussion about “HTM as an academic discipline”. HTM in its broadest version described in this forum ( a combined physician, pharmacist, biologist, clinical engineer, IT engineer) simply does not exist in real life or at least I have never met anyone practicing the profession. Or rather that is a hospital director or a health system manger from a business school or administrative background. In some countries those careers are open for biomedical engineers. Let’s also be aware there is a movement in which pharmacists take over the control of subsets of medical devices effectively approaching the “Health Technology Managers”.
I would like to mention that in France, for example, all sterile medical devices in a health care facility (and the sterilization unit as well) have to (legal requirement) be managed by a pharmacist. I do not know whether this applies in other countries. This requirement looks like something that could very well spread to other countries if that is not already the case.
There is clearly need, hope and opportunity for better management of health technologies as demonstrated by the examples mentioned below without creating a new academic discipline.
Best regards.
Mr Björn FAHLGREN
Technical Officer
World Health Organization
Department of Essential Health Technologies
Diagnostic Imaging and Medical Devices
20, avenue Appia
CH-1211 Geneva 27
Switzerland
Tel : +41 22 791 1510
Fax : +41 22 791 4836
