A 30% Quality Floor Won’t End Price-Only Contracting

In medtech, 61.8% of public contracts are awarded on price alone. Across all sectors, the figure is 51.8%. Those are MedTech Europe’s numbers, published by its chief executive, Oliver Bisazza, in June.

Medical technology is not just exposed to price-only buying. It is more exposed than the average public purchase.

That gap is the backdrop to the most consequential procurement file in Brussels. The European Commission adopted its proposal for a Public Procurement Act on 9 September 2026, and debate on the text is now moving through the European Parliament. Medtech groups are pressing to lock quality-based awards into every member-state contract. Their trade association has already warned that the proposal, as written, still lets price decide.

Both things are true. The proposal is a real break from lowest-price buying. It also leaves enough room for today’s contract to survive intact.

What the Commission has proposed

Public authorities in the EU spend around €2.6 trillion a year on procurement, roughly 15% of GDP, according to the Commission. The Act would replace the three 2014 procurement directives with a single, directly applicable regulation. Three provisions matter most for medtech.

The first is the award rule. Contracts would, as a general rule, be awarded on the best price-quality ratio (BPQR), with quality criteria carrying a minimum weighting of 30%, or 50% for labor-intensive contracts. Best quality for public money becomes a guiding principle of the regulation.

The second is digital infrastructure. The Commission describes interconnecting member states’ eProcurement systems into “a single integrated EU public procurement marketplace”. Each member state would set up a National Public Procurement Data Space as the central access point for procurement and contract lifecycle data, feeding a Union-level data space run by the Commission.

The third is European preference. Public buyers may restrict participation, require minimum Union or covered origin, or grant evaluation preferences. Across the board, preference is optional. It becomes mandatory only where sector-specific EU law requires it, as the Critical Medicines Act proposal does for critical medicinal products.

Why 30% still lets price win

A 30% quality weighting sounds like a floor. In practice it can leave price with 70% of the points, and arithmetic does the rest.

Take a common scoring method, in which the cheapest bid earns full price points and the others score in proportion. Supplier A offers the stronger product, scores 30 out of 30 on quality and prices at 100. Supplier B scores 20 out of 30 and prices at 85. A finishes on 89.5 points. B finishes on 90. A product rated a third lower on quality wins on a 15% discount.

That is the substance of MedTech Europe’s first reaction to the proposal: “A minimum quality weighting of 30% still allows price to decide an award, and broad derogations risk reopening the door to price-only buying.” It wants the weighting raised, the derogations narrowed, and quality defined by what matters in healthcare: clinical performance, patient outcomes and the total cost of care along the patient pathway.

The derogation describes today’s contract

The derogation is the larger risk. The proposal lets buyers set aside the minimum quality weighting where quality “can be sufficiently ensured through specifications, conditions for performance of contracts, or a combination” of those instruments with award criteria.

That is close to a description of how much hospital procurement already works. Write a tight technical specification, treat compliance as pass or fail, and let price decide among the bids that clear it. Under the derogation as drafted, a buyer can keep running that contract and stay inside the new rules.

The Commission considered going further. Its impact assessment set out an option that would have made BPQR with minimum quality weights compulsory, with no opt-out. It chose a framework built on BPQR as the standard method with a comply-or-explain mechanism instead. That choice, more than the headline principle, is what Parliament and Council will now negotiate.

Three questions the negotiation will settle

1. The weighting

Whether 30% holds, rises across the board, or rises only for defined categories where clinical outcomes and total cost of care should carry more weight than unit price.

2. The derogation

Whether “sufficiently ensured through specifications” stays broad, is narrowed to defined cases, or requires a published justification that a supplier can challenge.

3. European preference in health

MedTech Europe welcomes that preference stays voluntary, but argues that origin rules focused on final assembly overlook the research, design, certification and clinical support delivered in Europe. It wants health exempted, or preference confined to categories where competition is sufficient and supply is secure.

The timetable is long. The “One Europe, One Market” roadmap agreed by the three institutions targets the conclusion of negotiations in Q4 2027, and the rules apply two years after entry into force. On that timetable, hospitals will keep contracting under the 2014 framework until around 2030.

The baseline has to be set now

A reform with a 30% threshold and a broad derogation will not change behavior evenly. It will move some buyers, in some categories, in some countries, and leave others exactly where they are. A single EU-wide percentage cannot show which.

The spread is already wide. The Commission’s Single Market Scoreboard puts the share of procedures awarded to the cheapest bid in 2024, across all sectors, at 56% in Germany and Poland, 31% in Italy, 22% in France, 19% in Spain and 14% in the Netherlands. Those are national averages across everything public buyers purchase. They cannot show the spread inside medtech, between orthopaedic implants in one market and single-use consumables in another.

That is the measurement problem the Act creates. Its data spaces will eventually make award data richer and more comparable, but they are part of the reform, not a record of what came before it. Anyone who wants to know whether the reform works needs to know where price-only buying stood before it landed, country by country and category by category, and then track the shift contract by contract.

That is the job of contract intelligence built on award-level data. Vamstar’s contractr intelligence works at the level medtech commercial teams actually compete: the country, the buyer, the category and the award method. The data that sets the baseline today becomes the evidence of change once the rules apply.

What commercial teams should do now

The temptation is to wait for the final text. That would be a mistake, for three reasons.

Advocacy needs evidence. Parliament and Council will settle the weighting and derogation questions between now and the end of 2027. Arguments built on category-level price-only rates in named markets carry further than sector averages.

Pricing strategy needs a map. Where buyers already weight quality, the reform changes little. Where they buy on price through tight specifications, the derogation may change nothing at all. The commercial opportunity sits in the markets in between, and those need identifying now.

Bid capability needs time. Quality-weighted contracts reward evidence on outcomes, total cost of care and supply resilience. Building that evidence into bids takes longer than a two-year application window suggests.

The Procurement Act changes the rules. It does not change the starting point. The suppliers who measure that starting point now will be the ones who can prove, and price, what the reform delivers.

Sources: MedTech Europe, Oliver Bisazza, “Buying European is not enough: Europe must buy better” (3 June 2026); MedTech Europe, “Beyond lowest price: MedTech Europe’s first reaction to the EU Procurement Regulation” (10 September 2026); European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation on public contracts and concessions (Public Procurement Act), COM(2026) 590 final, explanatory memorandum and recitals (9 September 2026); European Commission, Executive summary of the impact assessment, SWD(2026) 592 (9 September 2026); European Commission, Questions and answers on the Public Procurement Act, QANDA/26/1819 (9 September 2026); European Commission, Single Market and Competitiveness Scoreboard, “Access to public procurement”, reporting period 2024 (accessed 2 November 2026); European Parliament, Legislative Train Schedule, “Public Procurement Act” (updated 20 September 2026); Keystone Procurement, “EU Public Procurement Act: Commission proposes a major overhaul of the EU procurement framework” (9 September 2026); Nelson Advisors, “This Week in European HealthTech, MedTech and Health AI” (30 October 2026).