Medtech trends 2026: Finding traction in a turbulent medtech market
Already the new year feels less like business as usual and more like a time of recalibration. One signal: the sheer volume of senior leaders announcing moves to new roles. We can’t remember a time when so much talent has been in motion. While this might look like simple personal ambition, we believe it reflects the broader mood of the industry as we enter 2026. Medtech organizations are placing new bets, and executives are moving to where they see the most durable opportunity.
We don’t expect 2026 to be a year of radical reinvention, but a year of evolving business models and assimilating market trends. The postpandemic dust has settled, and the successful playbooks for this next cycle are becoming clear. Fundamental changes in business models, commercial structures, care pathways and, of course, AI are playing out in earnest to meet the ever-evolving realities of modern healthcare.
Below is a look at the specific trends changing how medtech is doing business today.
Trend No. 1: M&A gets bigger and more targeted
For years, the winning playbook for share price appreciation among big strategics has been tuck-in mergers and acquisitions. But a few recent moves strain the definition of “tuck-in.” The notion of acquiring hot products to drive growth is not new, but we’re seeing a distinct evolution of that playbook.
Deals are getting bigger. In part, that’s because easy small assets have largely been spoken for—either locked up in early-stage funding or already acquired during the furious search for assets over the last two years. With Federal Trade Commission challenges proving less restrictive than anticipated, the broad consensus suggests a more permissive environment and companies are showing greater willingness to swing for the fences. Medtronic has publicly signaled a renewed focus on aggressive capital allocation after recognizing it had been on the sidelines too long. With capital returning to the market, 2026 is shaping up to be a busy year for making deals.
It’s still unclear whether this activity reflects empire building or a race for category leadership. Volume matters, but we expect to see a mix of “growth for growth’s sake” deals and more targeted strikes to fill specific portfolio gaps. Medtronic’s strategic investment in Anteris, is a clear example. It isn’t a revenue play but a specific bet on next-generation transcatheter aortic valve replacement technology. More broadly, companies are using M&A to acquire missing capabilities, from specific devices to software assets and ambulatory surgery center-oriented (ASC) portfolios, rather than simply buying generic revenue.
Cardiovascular remains the clear center of gravity. While that doesn’t mean other areas aren’t attractive, the underlying growth potential, combined with strong and reliable reimbursement, is driving capital into cardiovascular. The Boston Scientific acquisition of Penumbra stands as headline validation of this trend. More than being just a diversification play, it was a doubling down on high-growth interventional capability.
What’s new in the past one to two years is the propensity to spin off businesses that might produce cash but not growth. Orthopedics, dental, diagnostics and respiratory have all faced growth headwinds despite profitability. Much of the industry is trading pure EBITDA for top-line velocity, and cardiovascular aligns cleanly with that shift.
The result is a barbell strategy. Large consolidation plays in high-growth categories such as cardiology are balanced by targeted technology investments aimed at securing future capabilities. The checkbooks are open, but the targets are specific.
Trend No. 2: The end of the box drop and the shift to recurring value
Straightforward, line-item pricing has always been a point of risk, inviting purchasing agents to price shop and opening the door to low-cost import pressure. But 2026 will see the acceleration of a defensive necessity into an offensive strategy: business model innovation.
We’re seeing the rapid decline of the outright purchase. Fewer orthopedic and soft-tissue robots are being bought as pure capital expenditures. Instead, the market is moving toward accrual models, leasing and volume commitments. Procedure-based pricing is becoming standard in thrombectomy and valve repair.
Why? Because innovative deal structures align costs with hospital reimbursement and build durable competitive moats. But this shift is bigger than just creative financing.
We’re entering a business model shift that finally reflects how hospitals want to buy and how medtech wants to monetize innovation. The industry is moving from transactional sales to recurring value models, characterized by:
- Leasing and subscription models for capital equipment that lower the barrier to entry
- Blended hardware and software bundles that monetize the ecosystem, not just the metal
- Financing options that match ASC economics, with operating expenses favored over capital expenses
- Software-as-a-service extensions that add paid intelligence and analytics to devices already in the field
The days of the box drop are over. It can’t be just about product plus service anymore. It needs to be about product delivered as an ongoing experience that creates continuous value and continuous revenue.
Trend No. 3: Patient engagement and RWE become engines of medtech growth
Patient engagement + real-world evidence (RWE) = ROI.
It sounds like a simple formula, but the variables are changing fundamentally in 2026. We’re moving beyond the era when patient centricity was just a slogan for direct-to-consumer campaigns and RWE was a postmarket nice-to-have.
First, patient centricity is growing up. It’s moving from a slogan to infrastructure. For years, engagement meant education sites and adherence apps. In 2026, it becomes something deeper: embedding the patient’s voice throughout the product life cycle. Even for purely clinical products, such as robotics, implants and capital equipment, patients are becoming part of the value chain, driving outcomes, transparency and user experience decisions. Patients aren’t always the buyer, but they increasingly influence the ecosystem.
Second, RWE is reaching a maturity moment. It’s stepping into the spotlight not as an alternative to randomized controlled trials, but as a practical accelerator of approvals, label expansions and evidence generation. Why now?
- The FDA is setting clear expectations
- Data harmonization is finally improving
- AI is making large-scale curation realistic
The ROI comes from convergence. When you combine an infrastructure that engages patients with a rigorous RWE engine that captures their data, you get a self-reinforcing growth engine. In 2026, medtech is getting serious about building these capabilities rather than treating them as side projects.
Trend No. 4: Agentic AI becomes operational in medtech
When we talk about AI in healthcare, the conversation often gets stuck on the product side. That includes AI that diagnoses disease or tags anatomical structures. And to be clear, that market is real. With the rise of reimbursable software-as-a-medical-device and AI-enabled diagnostics from giants such as GE HealthCare and Siemens, AI is already paying bills for organizations that have navigated the regulatory pathway. The AI-in-product market is growing, but the pace is measured. What’s rising faster, and delivering more accessible returns, is AI applied to execution across core medtech value streams.
The shift heading into 2026 is about what AI invents and what AI executes across core medtech value streams. We believe this will be the inflection point when agentic AI begins to graduate from the lab to the line. Unlike gen AI, which writes text or code, agentic AI can autonomously execute multistep workflows across systems, with humans accountable for judgment and governance. For an industry weighed down by regulatory, quality and supply chain constraints, this is not hype. This is a direct attack on the cost structure.
We’re still early, but four agentic patterns show the most immediate promise when embedded in redesigned end-to-end workflows.
- In R&D, the regulatory agent. Moving beyond analysis to agents designed to draft regulatory dossiers, monitor global compliance changes in real time and flag evidence gaps before a submission is made.
- In supply chain, the self-healing network. The shift from reporting stockouts to fixing them, using agents to propose inventory rerouting based on predictive modeling and moving organizations closer to a just-in-case reality.
- In commercial, the tender and rep bot. Systems that ingest complex requests for proposals to autoconfigure compliant bid drafts, while nudging reps with real-time churn predictions and cross-sell opportunities.
- In customer success, the ambient admin. Invisible workflows that handle documentation and coding for providers, with the goal of removing the administrative friction that prevents devices from being used.
The winners will be the organizations that can tell real agentic systems from buzzwords and design them with clear boundaries, ownership and accountability from the start.
Trend No. 5: The ASC shift reshapes medtech commercial strategy
The shift toward ASC has been underway for years, but the scale of adoption in 2026 is changing behavior. New guidance from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has expanded the list of procedures approved for these settings, including cardiac ablations and spine procedures. Electrophysiology, supported by advances in mapping and energy technologies, is positioned to be a breakout area.
Reimbursement tells only part of the story. Physician economics are playing an increasingly important role. As hospital employment models compress autonomy, high-volume specialists are looking to ASCs for efficiency and equity, provided they have the right partners.
The more significant shift is not which procedures are moving but how the industry serves these sites of care. For too long, manufacturers treated ASCs as smaller hospitals with lower margins and higher service demands. That approach is breaking down. Complicating matters is the decentralization underway inside many large medtech organizations. As business units gain autonomy, companies still need to present a coherent face to ASCs’ networks that buy across categories.
Medtech manufacturers can no longer ignore this complexity or accept ongoing margin dilution. Many are investing in unified commercial models, pricing architectures and service playbooks. The work goes beyond sales coverage. It requires commercial orchestration, including shared customer data, integrated customer relationship management systems and coordinated contracting, to serve these customers profitably without breaking the profit and loss statement.
Medtech strategy in 2026 moves from ambiguity to a blueprint
If the signal for 2026 is clarity, then the mandate for leadership is execution. The market is moving out of its experimental phase and settling into a clear set of operational realities. The winning strategies of the last decade, relying solely on volume growth and incremental product updates, are giving way to a more disciplined approach to value creation. In 2026, the companies that separate themselves will be the ones who move beyond having the best product and focus on doing the following:
Approach mergers and acquisitions with precision. Stay clear-eyed about the strategic goal, whether that’s completing a capability, bolstering a core offering or entering a new market segment, rather than simply buying revenue.
Shift from transactions to recurring value. Embrace business models that align payment with the continuous delivery of outcomes rather than a one-time capital expense.
Operationalize patient centricity. This means moving it from a marketing slogan to an R&D discipline, using RWE as a primary engine for regulatory speed and label expansion.
Deploy agentic AI as a workforce. This involves using autonomous agents to strip away administrative friction across research and development, supply chain and commercial workflows that slow down innovation.
Solve the commercial complexity of the ASC. This means moving beyond the tendency to ignore or underadapt to the channel and instead building the dedicated, efficient capabilities required to serve these diffuse, margin-sensitive buyers profitably.
The opportunity for 2026 is not to wait for the next disruption but to execute on the model that has now come into focus. For the builders, the blueprint is ready.
