Study of medical device purchasing cycles through temporal series analysis

Abstract

Production of medical devices is subject to economic factors which vary according to the stability of regional markets. Manufacturers, distributors and other market participants do not always reach to commercialize medical products easily because the timing according to the market behavior is not always clear. The study of the buying cycles of the largest medical device markets worldwide using frequency analysis and techniques to identify markets coupling could serve as a guide to plan the interaction with the market or at least to synchronize the production schedule. This article presents an approach to study market behavior through time series that allows to decompose all the information facilitating analysis, using purchasing processes data of medical devices in the United States and the European Community obtained from the FDA and the WHO databases, the data comprises a period from 1996-2015 with a sampling frequency of 1 month. Singular Spectrum Analysis was made to extract the main components of each data set to identify which of the components coupled better both markets. Once the components were identified, a crossed correlation was applied over the reconstructed data to find the possible coupling between markets, separated by trend and oscillatory components. The main finding of this work is that there is no coupling between European and American markets, but both markets have in common purchasing cycles and can be affected by each other by non-immediate changes.