Long waiting lists plus overburdened staff and infrastructure – a legacy of the pandemic – highlight a broken healthcare model needing urgent rescue by medtech innovations, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).

“Our current capital intensive, hospital-centric model is unsustainable and ineffective,” says the WEF, predicting that healthcare delivery systems will transform radically through medtech such as data-enabled delivery systems and virtual care.

The forum also highlights global employment opportunities presented by the need for more than a billion people to be reskilled in medtech by 2030.

Medtech is everything from robotic surgery, innovative cardiovascular devices, and wearable health monitors right up to mobile diagnostic machines and 3D printing devices, plus many other pioneering systems for driving down healthcare costs.

And while it has significant power to save lives and enhance longevity, medtech innovation is also generating investment and revenue attractive enough to build an irresistible industry momentum, reckoned to be worth US$500 billion globally within the next couple of years, according to Statista.

Further acceleration in the sector is expected from major events like the LSI (Life Science Intelligence) Europe ’22 – Emerging Medtech Summit (Sept 21-24) at The Grove in Hertfordshire, close to London, with a global array of investors and strategics attending, already numbering more than 120, with 100-plus innovators.

It’s LSI’s – a medtech market intelligence consultancy – first European version of its highly influential annual springtime US medtech summits at Dana Point, California, which market watchers believe have transformed the sector’s growth in the USA.

These summits combine a stunning location and lavish programme featuring headline industry speakers, VIPs, and specialists, to gather the industry's most innovative start-ups, active investors, and strategic buyers so they can connect, collaborate, and build future healthcare.

LSI now wants to enhance Europe’s medtech sector. The continent has 27,000 companies in the sector, employing 675,000 people, with Germany, (210,000), the UK (100,000) and France (85,000) the leaders within that figure.

“Many European nations are already global medtech players,” said LSI President, CEO and Founder Scott Pantel. “If these national components could be more closely aligned then there is the potential to create a true continental medtech powerhouse, one that attracts even greater investment to make a really big impact on healthcare in a world shown to be cruelly exposed to major health threats.”

And while this three-day debut summit happens to be near London, Pantel says it will go to whichever locations the European industry dictates in the future – he hinted that it could be Paris in 2023.

Major figures already linked to the LSI European event include global Top 10 medical device company Siemens Healthineers’ German-based CEO Bernd Montag (keynote speaker); Paris-based Antoine Papiernik, Managing Partner at Sofinnova Partners, a leading pan-European venture capital firm in life sciences, specializing in healthcare and sustainability; and Swiss-based Claudia Herben, VP Strategic Solutions Medical Devices EMEA at Johnson & Johnson.

Over 100 Medtech innovators from across Europe are presenting, with UK participants including Mark Rosser, CEO of Serac Imaging Systems and Mark Evans, CEO of Adaptix, whose companies have developed sophisticated early intervention mobile devices to de-centralise and transform patient care.

They are joined by: Jorge Presa, CEO of Cyber Surgery (Spain); Peter Stebbins, Executive Chair of the Board at Nurami Medical (Israel); Andrew Cameron, CEO FeelTect (Ireland); Jon Hoem, CEO of Pacertool (Norway); Richard Ljuhar, CEO of ImageBiopsy Lab (Austria); Edvardas Satkauskas, CEO of Sentante/Inovatyvi Medicina (Lithuania); Pierre-Francois Migeotte, CEO & Co-founder of HeartKinetics (Belgium); Avi Fischer, CEO of ElectroPhysiology Frontiers (Italy) and many more.

LSI CEO Scott Pantel added: “We have already succeeded in gathering an impressive line-up of key medtech figures from across all of Europe and major international investors, and this LSI European summit will also acknowledge great achievements and become the go-to medtech industry event for Europe.”