Medtech prognosis: Going digital, under stress

“2010 will go down as one of the most angst-ridden years in health care . . . [but] medical electronics will be at the nexus of where health care is going in the next decade.”

With those opening comments at the recent EE Times Medical Electronics Summit, Charlie Whelan, a director of life science consulting at Frost & Sullivan, encapsulated the outlook for the health care sector.

The market is undergoing a historic transition to digital networked technology that will ultimately drive more care from the hospital to new kinds of consumer systems used in the home. But the sector is also under heavy challenges from increasingly complex global regulations and funding pressures.

An aging global population will make hospital-based health care unrealistic in the next 10 to 20 years, Ben Wilson, director of health care IT at Intel Corp., said during a summit talk. The company has pioneered home care for a decade, helping to establish the Continua Health Alliance, which has developed standards for remote-care systems now hitting the market.

“The really hot story in medical is the movement of technology out to the home,” Patrick O’Doherty, vice president of the health care segment at Analog Devices Inc., said in an interview at the DesignMed conference, part of the mammoth Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West event in Anaheim, Calif. “This has been a long-expected but never-arriving wave—until now,” O’Doherty added.