Over the next decade in the medical device industry, data and platform infrastructure will eclipse incremental hardware improvements as the primary driver of market value, according to a medtech industry expert.
Paul Tomasic, head of European healthcare at investment bank Houlihan Lokey, tells Medical Device Network that hospitals are now demanding “simplicity over variety”, with the key question being asked about new equipment no longer just a case of “‘What does this product do?’” but also “‘how does this product fit into our existing system?’”
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Tomasic noted that the medical device equipment market is moving towards a model where healthcare institutions are looking to “buy outcomes and efficiency rather than individual tools”.
“Our analysis shows that medtech companies with a clear platform strategy are not only growing faster, but are commanding exit multiples that are, on average, two to three times higher than stand-alone product companies in the same vertical,” Tomasic continued.
Tomasic’s insights resonate with remarks GE HealthCare’s CEO made during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference in January 2026. Peter Arduini highlighted that in recent years, the imaging giant has taken steps to ‘slim down’ its CT portfolio with the aim to reduce complexity for customers and lower internal costs. With this initiative in mind, Arduini stated that over time, GE HealthCare wants to be measured less as an imaging hardware vendor, and as more of a healthcare solutions provider.
“Perhaps the most profound change is the shift in the value of workflows: the financial markets are rewarding the pivot from hardware to data infrastructure with enormous premiums, valuing a recurring dollar of data revenue significantly higher than a one-time dollar of hardware revenue,” Tomasic continued.
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By GlobalDataWith these shifts, Tomasic emphasised that automation is “no longer an optional upgrade” but a “structural necessity”.
“These systems are increasingly underwritten as long-lifecycle infrastructure with high switching costs and deeply embedded, recurring revenue,” he stated.
This ideology shift is evident among other large players in the medical imaging space. Companies such as Philips have taken steps to shore up their infrastructure with the release of new orchestration tools that are a part of existing product suites, opposed to wholly new standalone products. Philips recently gained US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for SmartHeart AI, a tool to streamline cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) workflows and orchestrate applications within its existing MR tool suite.
Tomasic concluded: “As we look to the next decade, the landscape no longer rewards companies that simply sell better products. It rewards those who build indispensable infrastructure.”
