E-management of medical devices in Italy

The Italian Health sector has been experiencing, for several years, a re-organization process, to improve the efficiency of medical device management by the introduction of new instruments, included the Internet. In this setting, many companies offer innovative products via the web to the health administration, especially for e-procurement. Ital TBS is an Italian Clinical Engineering Services company, managing different biomedical equipment. Moreover it has been managing the Italian Observatory of Prices and Technologies, on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Health and the Friuli Venezia Giulia region. Actually, the national Data Bank consist of more than 70,000 models of medical devices. The know-how acquired by this activity makes Ital TBS the ideal company to create and manage a web portal for biomedical equipment. In order to write a sensible plan of development, we have completed a thorough analysis of the European and Italian Legislation, market analysis and analysis of competitors. The result is that the market does not demonstrate strong reasons to buy on-line, but is heavily interested in finding all possible information on technical specifications, possible configurations and efficient comparison of prices and performances. The ItalTBS choice is developing a web portal to offer high quality information about biomedical devices.