For many years pharma and medtech have effectively ignored the private sector. This reflects the fact that until recently the sector really wasn’t very important. Almost all the money was in public sector contracts.

My contacts say that this is now changing. Not only are large suppliers starting to notice the presence of these upstarts, they are also seeking a much closer engagement. They are beginning to grasp that private groups are best viewed not just as a pipeline down which increasing amounts of product can be sold by the sales force, but also as new players whose business models and ambitions need to be fully understood.

They understand that changes in procurement also mean central management is becoming much more important than the technical specialists such as surgeons or pathologists.

In short, they want to become partners.

This is most obvious when you talk to large suppliers in imaging and laboratory diagnostics. They are seeing the private sector acquiring more and more public sector outsourcing contracts.

I recently took a call from a senior manager in a big pharmaceutical company who wants to ensure that senior staff in every national subsidiary are tracking the private sector and understand how it operates.

It reminds me very much of the PC industry in the 1990s. Some players, notably HP, understood that dealers and distributors added value to their products and that they would not maximise sales unless they engaged in this way. One answer was education. HP proceeded to finance a serious 10 week course on how to run big resellers at INSEAD. Over 3-4 years most senior figures in the industry attended.

And then there was IBM which, at that time, saw intermediaries as passive pipes, who added nothing. It merely wanted to know what each intermediary was going to sell that quarter. Failure to hit target was followed by a chiding telephone call.

The head of a big reseller put it to me this way: “HP is a partner who is geniunely interested in my business. IBM treats me like a slave.” No prizes for guessing who did best over the next three years!

Of course, the private healthcare sector adds far far more value than IT resellers. But the basic point remains. Suppliers need to grasp and understand that value and that "the customer" these days is the hospital group rather than an individual professional. And that is something which they are innately bad at doing because they are all too often product-centric and myopically concerned with the next quarter’s sales figures.

Private healthcare operators need to understand this too. Time spent seeking out the enlightened senior managers in suppliers and ensuring they really, truely understand your business should be time well spent.