Thailand is abundant with talent in medical technology. Why aren’t our homegrown innovations reaching patients? The answer is simple: a broken system.

What will it take to turn Thai ideas into global medical breakthroughs? That answer is just as simple: fix the fragmented system.

Our country has the brains, the ambition, and a booming market waiting to be tapped. What’s missing is a clear path from lab bench to hospital ward and beyond.

The missed opportunity is enormous. Around the world, medical technology, or MedTech, is one of the fastest-growing frontiers in healthcare, driven by ageing populations, rising chronic disease, and rapid leaps in diagnostics, devices, and digital health.

For Thailand, it’s more than a hot market. It’s a chance to diversify the economy, expand access to healthcare, and claim a place as a regional technology leader.

Thailand has a strong research and business ambition. Yet, many homegrown innovations never make it to the market due to lack of sustained support in a fragmented system. Startups are then left to struggle alone on the long, costly journey from prototype to hospital ward.

Thailand’s MedTech Gap

According to BMI Research, Thailand’s medical device market is on a steady climb, growing at an annual rate of 6.2% between 2024 and 2029 and expected to hit 109.2 billion baht (USD 2.8 billion) by the end of the decade. About 1,000 companies are registered in the sector, though most focus on single-use exports such as gloves and syringes. The capacity is impressive, but few have stepped into the more complex and lucrative world of high-tech medical devices for the domestic or global market.

To help bridge that gap, the government set up the Thai Innovation List Scheme. It’s designed to turn research into real-world products and encourage public agencies to buy Thai-developed innovations. The rule is clear: at least 30% of an agency’s procurement budget for eligible goods and services should go to items on this list, using either a specific procurement method or a selective process when there’s more than one supplier.

Some progress is visible. The National Health Security Office, the country’s largest public health purchaser, has already brought several locally made products into the Universal Coverage Scheme benefits package. They include dental implants, colostomy bags, titanium cranial mesh implants, and OV-ATKs, a Thai-developed rapid test for liver fluke infections.

On the funding side, the Programme Management Units under the Science, Research and Innovation Fund, including the Thailand Center of Excellence for Life Sciences, the Health Systems Research Institute, and the National Innovation Agency, offer grants and R&D incentives to support the sector.

These moves are welcome, but the system is still missing one crucial element: a fully connected pathway that can take a MedTech startup from early research through regulatory approval, market entry, and eventually, global expansion.

Singapore playbook

Across the border, Singapore has successfully built Southeast Asia’s most dynamic MedTech hub through a deliberate, sustained strategy by design. Today, it is home to 30 of the world’s top multinational MedTech companies and over 400 firms, serving as a base for R&D, manufacturing, and regional headquarters.

The results are spectecular. By 2022, Singapore’s MedTech manufacturing output hit SGD 19 billion (USD 14 billion), or 2.7% of GDP. That’s nearly four times higher than a decade earlier. Its market is projected to grow 7.5% annually in local currency (8.9% in USD) from 2023 to 2028.

The formula? A coordinated, long-term plan with budget commitment. The Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2025 Plan commits SGD 25 billion, around 1% of GDP every year, between 2021 and 2025 to R&D, infrastructure, and talent in key sectors, healthcare among them. The plan succeeds through end-to-end coordinated support, from early-stage innovation, financial support for startup, to market entry.

Singapore’s support starts at the very beginning. The National Health Innovation Centre (NHIC) helps researchers turn prototypes into commercially viable products.

If the prototype succeeds, Enterprise Singapore’s Startup SG program provides grants of up to SGD 400,000 to fund the testing stage to show that the technology really works, and up to SGD 800,000 to demonstrate that the innovation delivers real value in hospitals and clinics.

When it’s time to sell, ALPS, a central healthcare procurement agency, smooths the path into hospitals, handling tenders, warehousing, and distribution. At every stage, innovators aren’t left on their own — from first sketch to full-scale use in healthcare.

Success Story

Take Vivo Surgical. Founded in 2018, it created KLARO, a deep-cavity surgical light designed with Panasonic to solve poor illumination during operations. NHIC funding of SGD 300,000 covered development and trials. Enterprise Singapore helped the company navigate market entry. By 2019, the product debuted at Medica, one of the world’s largest medical trade fairs, and secured FDA and CE approvals.

In 2023, Vivo Surgical expanded into China with the help of the A*STAR Partner Centre, which provided a RMB 2 million grant, office space, and entry into China’s MedTech network. This kind of structured, cross-border leap is rare for Thai startups.

Lessons for Thailand

Thailand faces a familiar problem: many startups create promising prototypes or win early funding, only to get stuck before they can grow. Complicated regulations, scarce late-stage funding, and a fragmented procurement system form a “Valley of Death” that too many never cross.

Singapore shows a different way. By connecting research, business development, and public procurement in a single, coordinated system, it turns prototypes into real products that reach hospitals and save lives.

Three moves are essential to close the gap.

First, centralised procurement and logistics, based on Singapore’s ALPS, could cut inefficiencies, improve transparency, and get Thai-made devices into hospitals faster. 

Second, full-cycle support from funding prototypes to offering tailored help through regulatory approval, reimbursement, and overseas expansion.

Third, cross-agency coordination. Public health agencies, innovation funds, regulators, and industry groups must work together under one shared strategy, not in separate silo, so that effort in one area isn’t undone by inaction in another.

Call to action

Thailand and Singapore both want to lead in MedTech. Singapore succeeds because it aligns strategy, funding, policy, and follows innovations all the way to the market. Thailand has the talent, research know-how, and a big market, but turning potential into impact will take systemic reform.

The choice is clear: stay stuck in fragmented systems, or build a unified MedTech ecosystem where innovations leave the lab, reach hospitals, improve lives, and expand globally.

With the right reforms, Thailand could also turn its homegrown talent into a regional MedTech powerhouse, creating medical devices that are not only invented, made, and used here but also exported worldwide to improve health everywhere.

Saowaruj Rattanakhamfu, Ph.D., is a researcher, and Pichakorn Khowasinth is a trainee at the Thailand Development and Research Institute (TDRI). Policy analyses from the TDRI appear in the Bangkok Post on alternate Wednesdays.