MedTech West aims to take advantage of Sweden's medical device prowess while working to increase interaction in order to push newer technologies to the clinical and medical settings with emphasis on lowering overall cost for health care. Several issues have been identified by international reviews of Swedish medical technology and the health-care industry that MedTech West aims to resolve.
MedTech West will stand on three pillars of innovation: improving interaction between the relevant partners, creating an environment conducive to translating new technologies into clinically relevant tools, and enabling more cost-effective solutions to modern health care issues.
- Sweden has a long and strong tradition in the medical device industry, with a relatively large proportion of global profits (4%) generated within the medical device field. The Swedish share is dominated by a small number of large companies, whose products are often based on innovations that were developed in years past. Unfortunately, the prospect for promising small and medium-sized companies based on innovative ideas is a difficult one, at best. An important reason for this is lack of networking / clustering between different companies in the field comes from a lack of interaction between the three key players required for development of new innovations: namely firms/industry, health care/hospitals, and academic research/universities. A recent international study initiated by VR, SSF and VINNOVA shows that Swedish medical technology is lacking foresight and that there is a severe shortage of new ideas and proposals for bold projects. The said situation at present has been confirmed by several independent investigations and constitutes the fundamental background and basis of MedTech West's existence.
- Specialized medical care is becoming increasingly high tech. Newly acquired effective treatments only partially reach commercial availability because they are often dependent on advanced diagnostics that are constantly and rapidly evolving. The development, routine daily operation, and coordination of various advanced diagnostic modalities requires high technical skills at the end-user level -- highly specialized hospitals today need not only "service techniques" but require technical excellence for regionally shared resources to be exploited adequately. The newly projected "image-building and intervention" center in the SU is one of many such regionally-shared resources that have these requirements. Collaboration between health care, universities, and the medical device industry is optimal for making new technology not only available but immediately exploited in a clinical setting. Proximity between these parties contributes to R & D efforts directed towards resolving key current issues in health care, while subjecting yesterday's innovator-driven projects to review according to their the medical relevance and feasibility. The need for such proximity was recently voiced in the investigation "Action MedTech" and provides the second pillar for the MedTech West's existence.
- The accelerating medical progress leads to an upward trend in the cost charged for highly specialized care. Demographic changes, such as aging, are increasing the health care consuming population. The need for cost control will require strict prioritization of the highly specialized medical facilities, and thus require an investment in distributed primary and home care. Such development relies on high hopes for technology development that would enable distributed diagnostics and monitoring for decision support available to a networked level of care. There are several promising examples of new advancements in distributed outpatient diagnostics within the VGR, including a cooperation between SU, Chalmers, and University of Borås, that are leading to clinical monitoring of physiological signals in the home environment, but they are still in the early development stage. This is also highlighted in the Chalmers Initiative Seminar: Technology and Construction for an Aging Population. Distributed diagnosis and monitoring is just one arena in which MedTech West aims to promote its third pillar of innovation: more cost-effective solutions to modern health care.
MedTech West is built on pre-existing collaborations. Chalmers and SU have worked together on development projects and collaborative research in medical technology for decades. The collaboration has primarily been between the Department of Signals and Systems at Chalmers (formerly Applied electronics) and services for neonatal and childbirth, and neurophysiology at SU. During the last decade, the technical side extended to the School of Engineering at the University of Borås with an intensification in cooperation with the Clinical Neurophysiology SU. The University of Borås has established operations in medical signal processing with a recent addition of focus on smart textiles, in particular with special emphasis on their utility in the medical field. A party of cooperation has also been founded in Medicine and Technology (SMT), formed by Chalmers in 1985 to bridge the clinical medical research into social and commercial utilization of results.
In this environment of well-established and informal cooperation many projects of multi-disciplinary nature have been born, some with other departments at Chalmers.
