Market and technology trends in IVD equipment

The most dynamic segment of healthcare – In vitro diagnostics, which is useful for detecting disease condition and helping healthcare professional to achieve better patient outcome is undergoing several technological advancements in the coming days. 70 percent of the clinical decisions including patient monitoring, line of treatment or monitoring treatment efficiency are dependent on IVD and that is how it is the most significant resource for healthcare.

In the coming time, the IVD industry will continue to dominate the medical technology market because of continuation of demands for early diagnosis, treatment and POC testing. As IVD is changing to customer focus stream, the product trends are also changing to provide accelerated consumerization of diagnostics. The rise of telemedicine and digital health are yet other boosters for the changes occurring in IVD equipment. All this will reinforce changes to occur in manufacturing of medical device manufacturing.

Although due to impact of pandemic, the medical device market growth rate declined from 9 percent in 2019 to 2.9 percent in 2021 but looking at the overall growth rate in past decade, the trend will not remain negative but will surely show positive impact on growth of this segment. The medical device diagnostic equipment will dominate the market due to acute demand for early outcome.

One of the major trends which is showing faster acceleration is consumerization of diagnostic, in which combining advance technologies with analytical software will increase number of home testing devices and help in reducing visits to healthcare providers by patients.

As a result of the pandemic, a rise is also seen in providing healthcare remotely by using technologies like electronic health records, remote monitoring software, wearables and virtual reality tools.

Personalized medicine has been on the rise for several years, leading to significant developments in the treatment of various diseases. This growth will be fuelled by advances in genomics, which will allow physicians to better understand the underlying causes of diseases and tailor treatments accordingly. Medical devices and diagnostics that enable personalized medicine, such as DNA sequencers and diagnostic tests, are expected to see strong growth.

On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence and robotics are expected to play an increasingly important role in the medical device sector. AI-driven devices, such as diagnostic instruments and surgical robots, are expected to become more advanced and more widespread.

With all upcoming trends, more emphasis is placed on critical thinking and identifying the most critical impact throughout the process, rather than focusing on documentation and formal testing when validating computerized systems used as part of the medical device manufacturing or quality system. Critical thinking is a complex subject that is difficult to define. In general, it is the rational, sceptical, and unbiased analysis of factual evidence. The ability to reason is a critical thinking skill combined with process knowledge.

Further trends in IVD market include, high demand for low-volume sample analysis and high-throughput screening methodologies. One emerging technology with the potential to answer these challenges is known as microfluidics – miniaturised devices that manipulate the behaviour of a fluid through a series of reagents. Microfluidics devices are sometimes referred to as lab-on-a-chip due to the technology’s ability to integrate several laboratory functions on a single integrated circuit. As the industry continues moving to POCT, lab-on-a-chip devices are the ideal way to get there, and large number of medical device companies are currently innovating in this space.

Growing global population age, life style trends, increasing chronic infection are also laying constant pressure on development of IVD industry. As consumers have become more revealing, customer-oriented democratization of testing will surely play major role in changes of IVD business & product models.