Product News

Note from the Editor

  • Pip Implant Scandal: Fix What’s Broke. Then Stop.
      Here are two headlines you don’t want to read: “Medical Devices and Chinese Toys Share Same Level of Safety Checks” and “The Terrifying Story of How a Former French Butcher Earned Millio...
    (January, 2012)
  • What it Costs to Operate a Medical Device Plant: Total Geographically Variable Operating Cost Ranking
      Source: The Boyd Company Inc.
    (October, 2011)
  • What it Costs to Operate a Medical Device Plant: The Highs and Lows
        (1) Includes all major geographically-variable operating costs for a 325-worker medical devices plant. (2) Includes property and sales/VAT taxes. Source: The Boyd Company Inc.
    (October, 2011)
  • The Relative Costs of Doing Business
      Did you know that it costs approximately twice as much to operate a medical device manufacturing facility in Munich as it does in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA? Running that plant in Sioux Falls will set you b...
    (October, 2011)
  • Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow
      “Nobody, including myself, would dispute that the medtech industry is a bastion of strength compared with other industry sectors in the current state of economic turmoil,” writes Joerg Kruetten, Exe...
    (September, 2011)
  • Scavengers of the Heart
      In my lifetime, artificial pacemaker technology has evolved from an external device with vacuum tubes that powered up via a wall socket to today’s tiny implantable devices with batteries that run for five...
    (May, 2011)
  • The Innovation Paradox
      Penny wise, pound foolish . . . I’ve always enjoyed the stark simplicity of that expression, which encapsulates an enduring truth. How this myopic mindset engenders an innovation paradox in the medical te...
    (May, 2011)
  • A Patently Absurd Situation
      There is a European Patent Office, but, as I am sure you are painfully aware, there is no single European patent. Instead, as noted recently in the Financial Times, there is simply a “basket of national p...
    (April, 2011)
  • Plaidoyer en faveur d’un brevet unique
      Innover ou mourir : jamais cette expression n’a sonné aussi juste. Et ce n’est pas pure vue de l’esprit que de formuler un tel dilemme à propos des mécanismes de protectio...
    (March, 2011)
  • Standards Objection
      The Formal Objection of the European Commission to 11 medical device standards has caused a certain amount of consternation and even alarm. The initiative has the potential to seriously undermine the EU regulat...
    (March, 2011)
  • I Was Just Thinking…
    Now that we have landed squarely in 2011, I thought it might be an opportune moment to put together a to-do list for Europe’s medtech community. Here goes. Learn Mandarin. Not content with being the world’s factory, China is ramping up innovation initiatives. The Medical Technology Inno...
    (January, 2011)
  • The Celtic Tiger Is Alive and Well and Living in Galway
      It was not a good year for Ireland, to be sure, but the commotion surrounding bailouts and bubbles did drown out some encouraging news. Specifically, Ireland’s medical technology sector and associated supply chain, much of which is clustered in and around Galway, fared remarkably wel...
    (January, 2011)
  • Healthcare Freakonomics
      Being old is cheap. It’s dying that’s expensive. With that curt observation, Sweder van Wijnbergen, PhD, got my full attention as he delivered the keynote speech at the Eucomed MedTech Forum in Brussels in October. A noted economist who earned his doctorate at Massachusetts Insti...
    (November, 2010)
  • One Day, You Will Spit on Your iPhone
    Remember when a phone was just for calling people? How quaint. We are living in the age of convergence, and healthcare, more than any other technology, exemplifies that in the minds of many. That is one of the perhaps surprising results of a survey conducted by Cambridge Consultants. When asked whi...
    (October, 2010)
  • A Matter of Life and Death
    “Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet th...
    (September, 2010)
  • It was 20 years ago…
    …NOT TODAY, GRANTED, and that does muddle the cadence of the sentence, but at my age it’s difficult to resist a Beatles reference. Be that as it may, Medical Device Technology (MDT) magazine was launched two decades ago in January 1990. It was followed shortly by International Medical D...
    (June, 2010)
  • Turning Silver into Gold
    Are we ready? A huge wave of business is coming our way, but only to those who are planning right now for the impending new reality. I refer of course to demographics. What will it be like living in a society where up to one half of all the people around us are aged over 60? If we stop to think abou...
    (May, 2010)
  • Edito
    Télémédecine : l’heure du « point de bascule  » ?
    (April, 2010)
  • An Inconvenient Truth about Reprocessing Single Use Devices
    Sometimes, what may seem like the right thing to do is just plain wrong. A commentary titled “A Call to Go Green in Healthcare by Reprocessing Medical Equipment,” published in the March 2010 issue of Academic Medicine, argues that the reprocessing of medical equipment, including single-u...
    (April, 2010)
  • One Step Closer to Perfection
    Suddenly I find myself excited by checklists. I have been converted to the power of a checklist by surgeon Atul Gawande who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is author of the recently published book: The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande helped devise a 19-point surgical checklist for the World Healt...
    (March, 2010)
  • A Note from the Editor
    This Birthday Is Giving Us Excitations Auric Goldfinger used it to try and slice James Bond in half. Dr Evil threatened to aim one at the White House. It was the quintessential weapon of mass destruction in countless science fiction movies. It also has left its mark in the real world, and in much ...
    (February, 2010)
  • A Note From the Editor
    We've evolved! WELCOME TO EUROPEAN MEDICAL DEVICE TECHNOLOGY (EMDT), which merges the 20-year heritages of Medical Device Technology (MDT) and European Medical Device Manufacturer (EMDM). We thought, what could be better than MDT for practical analysis on how to use new technologies in the manufact...
    (January, 2010)
  • One Reason Why 2010 Is Going to Be a Very Good Year
    So, you followed the trail of breadcrumbs from the cover and ended up here, anticipating a momentous announcement. If you got to this page by some other route, drop everything and make a U-turn back to the cover. I’ll wait. Now that we are a...
    (December, 2009)
  • Healthcare for the Poor? There's an App for That
    A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR The pages of EMDM are a bit like an exploded view—figuratively and literally—of modern medical devices. We cover everything from supremely sophisticated implantable electronics to relatively simple moulded plastic parts as l...
    (October, 2009)
  • A Healthy Debate?
    A note from the editor
    (September, 2009)