Summary

Finland’s resolve to reduce Cancer and Rare diseases likely to aid medical device growth

As of 2021, Finland has 202 hospitals and imaging centers, with 119 public facilities and the remaining being private. The country’s healthcare system is one of the best in the world in terms of quality, accessibility, and availability of healthcare professionals. The country has also made significant progress in reducing mortality due to stroke and ischemic heart disease. While overall mortality due to various cancers has been on the decline, chronic liver disease and pancreatic cancer continue to be on the rise.

Even though referrals for specialist visits are available immediately, the waiting time for primary treatments could be several weeks. Despite being able to maintain a reduction in waiting time over the past couple of years, these waiting times are higher than several European countries. For instance, the waiting time for hip and knee replacement is approximately about 10 and 14 weeks respectively. This is significantly higher than Denmark, Italy and Sweden. Consequently, about 20% of patients in Finland have reported unmet medical care needs resulting from long waiting times.

According to EMeRG’s new HospeTrack Hospital Intelligence for Finland, secondary care hospitals represent sizeable medical device opportunities in the foreseeable future. As per the HospeTrack dataset, there are less than 200 MRI machines across the country suggesting favorable market opportunities for medical device manufacturers both in the tertiary and secondary care segment.

Over the last five years, the number of new cancer cases diagnosed each year has increased from about 34,000 to 36,000. In order to curb this, the Model Country 2020 project was launched by the government to target implementation of effective prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. Additionally, for the past few decades, cancer screening programs have been conducted and regulated by the Health Care Act and Governmental Decree of Screenings. In spite of these efforts, cancer is one of the highest preventable mortalities in Finland, with over 13,000 deaths annually. Among the rising incidence of cases and mortalities, prostate cancer is the highest, followed by breast cancer, and lung cancer. Furthermore, it is estimated that six out of every 100 Finns have a rare disease. With clinicians having limited knowledge and prioritization around such diseases, delayed diagnosis continues to be a key challenge. This indicates the need for several clinical decision support systems that may be AI driven. In addition, the market for genetic tests is also likely to benefit as the government’s National program for rare diseases takes shape. Currently, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases are centralized and confined to five university hospitals in the country.

The report provides account-level directional detail on total beds, ICU beds, ORs, ventilators, incubators, and other medical equipment installed in Finland, as well as Anesthesia Machines, Dialysis machines, C-Arms, Cath Labs, PET, SPECT, CT, MRI scanners, Ultrasound, and X-Ray machines, and Mammography machines making it a noteworthy source of hospital-level intelligence for Finland’s medical equipment installed base.

The report is a skillfully designed dataset that is an invaluable resource for any organization in the process of optimizing sales targets, estimating market potential, or developing an account management strategy in Finland. It provides a graphical overview of the country’s health infrastructure, and an account-level view of resources, directional information on the medical device installed base, hospital demographics, and care services.

Key companies included in the dataset: Baxter, Gambro, GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Toshiba Medical Systems, Philips Healthcare, Canon Medical Systems, Agfa Healthcare, Hologic, Elekta, Varian, Carestream, Sectra, Cerner, CGI, Epic Systems, Esko