
In this report, and as per the European Commission's Annual Single Market Report 2021, the scope of a health ecosystem (sometimes described also as healthcare or healthcare system) includes the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and their key inputs, medical devices and equipment and personal protective equipment, healthcare services (medical and residential care), health technologies and related services. For the purposes of this report, the health industrial ecosystem includes primarily patients and healthcare professionals together with all the different products and services involved in the inpatient or outpatient medical care, making it a very complex and broad system of various stakeholders along the value chain that are all dynamically interconnected via horizontal and vertical links among them, as well as framework conditions that support its functioning