Healthcare companies: Accelerate global sales with help from Export Development Canada

Healthcare companies: Accelerate global sales with help from Export Development Canada

Last week, MaRS Future of Medicine welcomed Mark Senn, account executive at Export Development Canada (EDC), an export credit agency owned by the federal government. He led a discussion about the state of the healthcare sector and what EDC is doing to help the companies within this sector increase their sales globally.

The session’s agenda included:

  • what EDC is and how it works;
  • what Mark does to position the healthcare sector; and
  • what EDC can do to work with Canadian companies that are looking to export.

Mark has spent the past six months examining healthcare companies for EDC and came to MaRS to share, as well as listen to, the challenges that many life sciences and healthcare companies are facing.

Challenges faced by healthcare companies

While the demand for healthcare is increasing around the world, the ability of institutions, such as governments and insurers, to provide healthcare cannot meet this demand. This gap needs to be filled with companies that can provide viable and sustainable solutions, like MaRS’ life sciences and healthcare clients.

Unfortunately, healthcare companies face many challenges, like long production cycles, which often lead to difficulties in obtaining financing, and a lack of acceptance in the domestic market, which often creates barriers to foreign acceptance. To mitigate these issues, programs like MaRS EXCITE help companies accelerate the adoption of their innovative and disruptive technologies domestically.

EDC works with companies that Mark described as being in the “accelerator” phase—companies that have market interest but limited capital. EDC assists these companies by working with buyers to arrange financing solutions, providing accounts receivable insurance and facilitating introductions between companies and potential partners, among other things.

See Mark’s slides for more information about the services EDC can provide to Canadian companies that wish to export their products.

For more information on the state of the healthcare sector, check out “The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care.”