According to a medtech industry expert, in the next decade in the medical device industry, data and platform infrastructure will overtake incremental hardware developments as the primary drivers of market value.
Paul Tomasek, head of European healthcare at investment bank Houlihan Loki, says Medical Devices Network As hospitals now demand “simplicity over variety,” the key questions being asked about new equipment are no longer just “‘What does this product do?'” but “How does this product fit into our existing system?”
Tomasek noted that the medical device market is moving toward a model where healthcare organizations are looking to “buy outcomes and efficiency rather than individual devices.”
“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 single-product companies in the same vertical,” Tomasek continued.
Tomasek’s insights are consistent with comments made by the CEO of GE HealthCare during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2026. Peter Arduini points out that in recent years, the imaging giant has taken steps to ‘slim’ its CT portfolio with the aim of reducing complexity for customers and reducing internal costs. With this initiative in mind, Arduino said that over time, GE HealthCare wants to scale less as an imaging hardware vendor, and more as a healthcare solutions provider.
“Perhaps the most profound change is the change in the value of workflow: financial markets reward the shift from hardware to data infrastructure with huge premiums, the recurring dollar value of data revenue is significantly higher than the one-time dollar value of hardware revenue,” Tomasek continued.
With these changes, Tomasek emphasized that automation is “no longer an optional upgrade” but an “structural requirement.”
“These systems are increasingly being written off as long-term infrastructure with high switching costs and deeply embedded, recurring revenue,” he said.
This paradigm shift is evident among other major players in the medical imaging space. Companies like Philips have taken steps to build out their infrastructure by releasing new orchestration tools that are part of existing product suites, as opposed to entirely new stand-alone products. Philips recently received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for SmartHeart AI, a tool to streamline cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) workflows and orchestrate applications within the existing MR tool suite.
Paul Tomasek
