Another category of high value consumables began to haggle. Medtronic, Lepu, St. Yoda

Nearly a month later, on November 24, Guangdong Pharmaceutical Trading Center finally released the official “Centralized Procurement Document of Pacemaker Medical Consumables Alliance” (hereinafter referred to as the “official document”), and another category of high-value consumables officially began to haggle.

Compared with the opinion draft, it can be found that there are many new changes in the official document in the areas of the alliance centralized procurement, the categories of gentralized procurement and the execution time of the selected results.

A new province has joined the centralized procurement
As can be seen from the official documents, the region of the collective mining alliance has been expanded, and Guizhou Province has been added. Four provinces, Jiangxi, Hubei, Guangdong and Guizhou, have participated in the collection.

The varieties of centralized purchase are listed cardiac pacemaker medical consumables, cardiac defibrillator medical consumables and lead medical consumables used together with cardiac pacemaker defibrillator, which have obtained valid medical device registration certificate of the People’s Republic of China. The temporary lead and subcutaneous defibrillator lead medical consumables are not included in the scope of this centralized purchase.

A comparison of the draft shows that the official document merges the categories of “non-full-body compatible” and “non-compatible”, thus reducing the number of product categories from 31 to 22.

In addition, the purchase cycle of the pacemaker alliance will be from the actual implementation of the selected results to June 30, 2025, which is more than half a year longer than the draft’s December 13, 2024.

The selection rules are further refined
Different from the opinion draft, the proposed selection rules of the official document have been further refined, and the lead consumables and pacemaker consumables have been divided into two cases.

It is learned from the document that other varieties, other than conductors, meeting one of the following conditions will be eligible for the proposed selection:

1. With the registration certificate with the lowest purchase price of national quantity, if the P1 declared is not higher than the lowest purchase price of national quantity of the corresponding category of the registration certificate, the registration certificate will be eligible for selection in the corresponding category.

2. If there is no registration certificate of the lowest national procurement price with volume, and the P1 declared by the registration certificate is no less than 25% lower than the lowest national procurement price of the corresponding category (rounded to retain to a single digit), the registration certificate will be qualified for the proposed selection of the corresponding category.

For pacemakers and defibrillator leads, eligibility for selection is determined according to the following rules:

1. If the same category has the registration certificate with the lowest price, and the declared P1 price is more than or equal to 5% lower than the lowest price of this registration certificate corresponding to the category to which the registration certificate belongs, then the registration certificate will obtain the qualification of proposed winner and incremental qualification of the corresponding category.

2, the same category does not have the lowest price with volume but has a non-volume lowest price of the registration certificate, its declared P1 price than the category to which the registration certificate belongs corresponding to the non-volume lowest price of this registration certificate of ≥ 30% reduction, then the registration certificate to obtain the corresponding category proposed to win the qualification and incremental qualification.

Among them, the lowest price of volume purchase refers to the lowest selected price of centralized volume purchase in all provinces of the country, while the lowest price of non- volume purchase refers to the low value among the lowest price of the country outside Guangdong, the historical purchase price filled in by medical institutions in the alliance region, and the online transaction price of the provincial platform.

It can be believed that for some enterprises that have experienced the collective purchase of pacemakers, as long as the quotation is not higher than the previous winning price, there is a chance to be directly selected.

The official document also announced that medical institutions in the Alliance area will purchase a total of 39,063 products with a volume of ≥10 in 2021. Including St. Jude, Medtronic, Lepu, Beitori, Primo Technology, Chuangling Rhythm and many other well-known enterprises.

It is worth noting that there are only two suppliers of three chamber pacemakers and three chamber defibrillators, namely, Medtronic and St. Jude, which are all foreign-funded machinery enterprises.

48,000 down to 24,000

How much more room for price reduction?

This is not the first time pacemakers have been collected. As early as 2019, Jiangsu Province, a major province for pacemaker implantation in China, took the lead in the collection of dual-chamber pacemakers. At that time, the price reduction was modest, with a maximum reduction of 38.18%. Since then, many places such as Yunnan, Anhui, Qinghai and Shandong have also launched the wholesale purchase of pacemakers, and the price reduction has not exceeded 50%.

However, in 2021, after more local and provincial alliances join, the price reduction increased significantly. The provincial alliance organized by the Beijing Tianjin Hebei “3+N” alliance for the collection of pacemaker medical consumables, with an average decrease of 50%; After the expiration of the previous contract for the centralized purchase of cardiac pacemakers, Jiangsu Province conducted a new round of negotiations, with a maximum decrease of 69%.

The pacemaker belt procurement of eight provinces (corps), including Shaanxi and Gansu, is currently the largest collection of dual-chamber pacemakers in China. Among them, all full-body compatible MRI pacemakers are selected by multinational enterprises, and their prices are all reduced to less than 20,000 yuan. Non-compatible MRI pacemakers include three foreign companies, Medtronic, Abbott and Boston Scientific, and two local companies, Lepu Medical and Chuang Ling Rhythm. The selected price is around 16,000 yuan, among which the lowest price is 12,895.96 yuan from Lepu Medical.

This year, the final price reduction of the purchase of cardiac pacemakers in Hainan Province reached 78.26%. The average price of cardiac pacemakers fell from 48000 yuan/piece to 24000 yuan/piece. Abbott, Medtronic, Boston Scientific Corporation, Chuang-ling Heart Rate and Baiduoli all won the bid.

Experts in the field of cardiovascular medicine said that pacemakers have a very high technical threshold, and domestic pacemakers are highly dependent on imported chips, wires, batteries and other core technology products. But we can also find that, even if the decline has repeatedly broken down, the major import brands are still unwilling to give up the huge market in China. Under the condition that the price of double chamber pacemaker after collective mining is more than 10,000 yuan at the present stage, can the price of pacemaker consumables be reduced to a lower level? It is worth the attention of all enterprises and dealers.

Source：Medical Device Distributors Alliance

Translated & edited  | Bradyknows