Medical devices are critical for detecting and treating many serious health conditions facing mothers and newborns, including anemia, pre-eclampsia, and neonatal respiratory distress. They also have expensive and complex training and maintenance needs and are thus challenging to manage effectively in low resource settings. However, there is a lack of systematic, cross-country, and cross-device data outlining these challenges and evaluating current device access.

PATH led the Market Dynamics for Medical Devices (MD4MD) project to address this need, quantifying device availability and diagnosing key barriers to access for five priority countries and seven priority maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) devices. This report aims to summarize key findings from this research and outline an investment agenda for improving access to these critical devices.