What’s really shaping MedTech in 2026? A mid-year round-up of insights
By Guy Pascoe, Co-Founder
As we reached the middle of 2026, the MedTech industry feels like it’s at an interesting inflection point. Over the past six months, our team has been producing a range of content shaped by conversations we’ve been having across the industry, with clients and fellow experts. On the surface, these perspectives cover different topics, but when you step back and take a more holistic view, a clear picture starts to emerge.
Certain ideas keep cropping up, not always the same, but often enough to feel significant. While many of these themes are widely reflected in broader industry reports and regulatory discussions, what’s stood out to us is how often they are converging in practice.
From where we sit, working day-to-day in MedTech, it feels less like a list of trends and more like a shift in mindset regarding how organisations are thinking about evidence, insight, and what it really takes to move from innovation to real-world use. This isn’t a set of predictions, it’s a reflection of what we’ve been seeing repeatedly, and why we think it matters.
1. Real-world evidence is moving from compliance to something much more strategic
If there’s one topic that keeps resurfacing, it’s real-world evidence, which isn’t new. Regulatory expectations continue to shape how organisations collect and report data, and that isn’t going away. What does feel different is how teams are starting to think about the purpose of evidence.
In more recent conversations, the focus has shifted. It’s no longer just about what needs to be collected, instead there is growing emphasis on what evidence is actually useful, and how it can support decisions throughout the product lifecycle. This aligns with wider industry thinking too, where real-world evidence is increasingly seen as critical beyond clinical development alone and into ongoing decision-making and performance evaluation.
We’ve seen this reflected in discussions particularly around off-label data. Historically, this has often been approached with caution, framed primarily as a compliance risk. More recently, the tone has started to change. There is more interest in what it can reveal about real-world use, especially when captured in a structured way.
This is where approaches such as Post Market Surveys are starting to feel more central. Not simply as a requirement, but as a way of generating consistent, meaningful evidence that can be used with confidence.
2. Understanding how decisions are made is becoming non-negotiable
Alongside the growing focus on evidence, another theme that keeps cropping up is the recognition that understanding decision-making is still one of the biggest challenges in MedTech.
On paper, decisions can look relatively straightforward. Performance, safety, economics, all important and all measurable. However, in reality it rarely plays out that cleanly. In our work, we continue to see how much influence sits outside formal data. Clinical environments are busy and often under pressure, familiarity plays a role, perceptions of risk differ between individuals and institutions and finally trust, once established, often doesn’t shift.
More broadly, decisions in MedTech rarely sit with one person. They are shaped by a network of stakeholders, each with their own biases and constraints. That complexity is well recognised across the industry and continues to be a defining characteristic of how adoption happens in practice. The result is that strong evidence does not always translate into uptake. Not because it lacks quality, but because it does not fully connect with how decisions are made in the real world.
There is growing recognition that with so much investment going into new product development, the stakes for getting it right have never been higher. That means understanding not just what stakeholders say they value, but how decisions are actually made in practice. In that context, approaches such as SIMALTO, conjoint analysis and other structured trade-off methods can help unpack how different stakeholders weigh attributes, compromises and priorities, offering a more realistic view of what drives preference, adoption and change.
3. Data is everywhere, but understanding it still breaks down
It would be difficult to argue that MedTech lacks data. If anything, the challenge is now the opposite. Organisations have access to more information than ever before, whether through clinical studies, real-world evidence, or internal performance tracking.
And yet, many of the same questions remain. Why do some products struggle to gain traction? Why do value propositions fail to resonate? Why does strong evidence not always change behaviour? These are not purely data-driven questions.
Across healthcare more broadly, there is increasing recognition that collecting data is only part of the challenge. The ability to interpret it, integrate different sources, and translate it into meaningful action is just as important.
From our perspective, this is where things often break down. Not because data is lacking, but because the context around it is not fully understood.
4. Qualitative insight is quietly becoming essential again
In that context, it’s not surprising to see qualitative insight becoming more prominent again. Not in a dramatic way, but in a more grounded sense. A recognition that without understanding how people actually think and behave, it becomes difficult to interpret data properly.
Across healthcare and life sciences more broadly, qualitative research is increasingly seen as a critical complement to quantitative and clinical data, particularly when it comes to understanding experiences, motivations and decision drivers.
We’ve seen this play out repeatedly in our own work. The small frictions that don’t get articulated and the assumptions that shape behaviour over time. The trade-offs that happen in practice but don’t always surface in structured research.
These are the kinds of insights that don’t always show up in datasets, but they often explain them. There’s also a stronger link emerging between qualitative insight and real-world evidence, one helps explain behaviour and the other shows how it plays out at scale. Together, they provide a much clearer view.
In MedTech particularly, those softer insights often explain why a device that performs well clinically may still face resistance in practice, whether because of workflow disruption, usability concerns, training burden or differences in how value is judged across clinical, procurement and commercial stakeholders.
5. Innovation still struggles when it doesn’t fit reality
Another consistent theme is the gap between innovation and adoption. There is no shortage of innovation in MedTech. Advances in digital health, diagnostics and connected care continue to push the industry forward, but success is not just about what is technically possible. It’s about whether those innovations can be embedded into real-world systems.
Across the industry, there is increasing focus on ensuring innovations deliver measurable outcomes across different care settings and workflows, not just in controlled environments.
In practice, we still see examples where strong solutions struggle because they don’t quite fit into the environments they are designed for. That might be due to workflow, usability, or the realities of implementation.
This is where bringing different types of evidence together becomes particularly important. Early insight can highlight potential barriers. Real-world data can confirm how those barriers play out over time. Looking at one without the other rarely gives the full picture.
6. The patient perspective is becoming more visible
Another shift we’ve noticed, perhaps more gradually, is the increasing presence and growing recognition of the patient voice. Patients today are more informed than they were even a few years ago. Access to digital tools, data and information has changed both expectations and behaviour. Across the industry, this shift is reflected in a greater emphasis on patient participation, experience and outcomes.
That has implications across the entire MedTech landscape. It influences how value is understood, shapes conversations between clinicians and patients and it also plays a role in how technologies are adopted and used in practice. For organisations operating in this space, it means expanding the lens. Clinical and commercial perspectives remain critical, but they are no longer the only ones that matter.
Where this is all heading
Individually, none of these ideas are entirely new. What feels different is how consistently they are appearing together.
Across the first half of the year, there has been a noticeable shift towards a more connected way of thinking. Primary market research is being used to better understand context. Real-world evidence is being used to demonstrate what happens in practice. Increasingly, those two are being brought together. When that happens, the outcome is not just more data, it is a clearer understanding of what is actually going on.
How Purdie Pascoe closes the gap
The challenge sits in how that data is understood, and how it is used to support decisions in the real world. That is exactly why these themes keep coming up in our work, as we sit across both sides of the equation.
We work closely with teams to understand behaviours, decision dynamics and unmet needs through primary market research. At the same time, we support the generation of structured, regulatory-grade real-world evidence through Post Market Surveys.
Seen in isolation, each of those perspectives is valuable. Seen together, they tell a much fuller story. They show where insight and evidence align, highlight where there are gaps, and, increasingly, they help answer the questions that sit somewhere in between.
From where we sit, that connection is becoming harder to ignore. Organisations making the most progress are not treating research and evidence generation as separate activities. They are bringing them together, using each to inform the other, and building a more confident understanding of their market as a result. And that, ultimately, is why we are talking about this now.
Because across everything we’ve seen so far this year, that joined-up approach is not just useful, it is becoming essential.