Study Reveals Significant Opportunities in Declining Patient Monitoring Market

• Companies must provide more value for money or value added services

A study conducted by Cambridge Consultants into the Critical Cardiac Care Monitoring market has concluded that significant opportunities for growth are being missed and that with careful positioning, any one of the current major players could take the majority share.

At present not a single company can claim a market share in excess of 30%. Using market improvement and strategy programmes, designed to enhance the impact and value of a product launch, companies can start to achieve enhanced market share and growth in a declining market.

Cambridge Consultants looked at the main Critical Cardiac Care Monitoring markets in Western Europe and found that between 1999 and 2002 they were static or in recession. When segmenting the market, Cambridge Consultants also found that the market for products aimed at patients with medium acuity needs was the largest in terms of value, but the leading players in the industry only supplied 65% of the products. This compares with the similar sized high acuity monitoring market, where the leading players supplied 95% of the equipment.

One conclusion from the study is that the boundary between medium and high acuity markets is becoming increasingly ill defined as the monitoring business moves towards a more adaptable, price-sensitive market. In order to gain market share, companies will have to take advantage of this by either producing products that are clearly excellent value for money, or to provide more value-added services and clinical IT support.

With the exception of one company, almost all market participants within patient monitoring have launched new product families or product offerings over the past three years, but in general these have not had significant impact on market share. Such introduction efforts have been accelerated by the industry’s micro-recession in 2000 and the continuing zero or near zero growth that has been observed since.

Tim Clay, manager of Business Innovation Management who conducted the study commented, "Companies are going to have to become more adaptable and face the changing market in order to survive. To gain and maintain position as the overall market leader in Critical Cardiac Care Monitoring, new business models will have to be adopted which closely examine all financial, portfolio and geographic options to determine the best strategy for moving forward."

Cambridge Consultants used their Performance Modelling (PM) methodology to assess the supply and demand performance of each competitor in the industry. Rather than just analysing metrics to determine performance, PM is a balance of quantitative and qualitative indices. These include quality, utility, reliability, purchase performance and connectivity and are designed for the competitive comparisons of product performance, as well as market growth and share.