Transforming Canada into a global centre for medical device innovation and adoption

This report examines the medical device industry in Canada and identifies the value of the medical device industry as a strategy for strengthening the sustainability of Canada’s public health care systems. [...] Software is a medical device if it is sold for the purposes given in the definition of a device or used as a component of a device.5 Regulatory Structure: In Canada, medical devices are regulated by Health Canada, with the legislative mandate of protecting patients from harm by ensuring the quality of medical devices. [...] Medical device sales reached $220 billion in 2009.11 In 2008 the global medical device market grew faster than the global drug market.12 Advances in the globalization of world markets, improvements in the standard of living in evolving economies, and an increasing elderly population in developed nations, makes the medical device industry one of the most profitable sectors in the world’s economy. [...] This exodus is attributed to the lack of incentives to grow and develop in this market, the regulatory burden and the size of the market. [...] Canada’s multicultural environment offer the ability to find locally intimate knowledge of foreign cultures to support the export of new medical device products and guide successful cultural arbitrage, and the multicultural community offers medical device companies the ability to generate clinical trial data in Canada that is more generalizable to global markets than trials conducted in more homog