Medical device companies are facing a changing regulatory environment that can lead to time-to-market delays, higher costs, and delays in collaboration agility and efficiency across product lifecycles.
From engineering design handover to manufacturing, to traceability and collecting audit-ready data, medical technology professionals are primed for digital transformation across the enterprise to address these challenges and help them achieve their business goals. These digital solutions are providing insights and opportunities for training and maintenance, design updates and improvements, and real-time surveillance.
3 Ways Digital Solutions are Positively Impacting Surgical Robotic Technology
- Real-time Monitoring: Real-time visibility into how your processes, people, and products function is key to improving efficiency, safety, service, compliance, and downtime. Increase uptime, enable predictive maintenance, and access critical insights to increase efficiency and operational safety. Not only does this data provide insights for future improvements, but it also can alert to necessary maintenance before a machine fully breaks down, limiting downtime and safety issues.
- Up to 48% fewer safety incidents
- Up to 30% less unscheduled downtime
- Up to 50% improvement in OEE
Post-market surveillance (PMS) provides critical insights through capabilities to gain live
product performance monitoring and to apply analytics to improve business operations. To gain timely insights into field use, medical device firms are incorporating sensors into their product designs to monitor safety, performance, and usage trends.
- Maintenance & Training: Constant maintenance and unplanned downtime not only causes reliability risks due to safety and accuracy issues but can cost organizations up to $700 per minute! Real-time monitoring can provide insights into maintenance issues before they become bigger problems with long periods of downtime. An unexpected breakdown or malfunction can lead to hazardous working conditions for both doctors and patients. By predicting when a malfunction may occur, service can be carried out before a machine becomes dangerous.
Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality (AR) can also provide users with virtual maintenance assistance and training. Modernize training methods and gain immediate access to remote expertise. Training costs can be reduced by up to 50% with AR as the technology is reshaping how frontline employees acquire knowledge and digitally interact with their physical surroundings—resulting in faster execution, less manual processes, and better decision making.
- Product Development & Design: Boost efficiency, ensuring products cost less to produce and increase reliability by validating that designs are meeting market requirements (and require less maintenance and fewer repairs). What was traditionally done using manual drafting can now be replaced with simulation software allowing designers and engineers to iterate designs faster, reduce costs by forgoing prototyping costs and materials waste, and improve overall product quality.
When products are tested for real-world conditions through simulation against real-time performance data, you can ensure they’re designed to run to spec—eliminating both reworks to solve for design failures and extra service calls for maintenance and repair. CAD and simulation software provides product design and analysis validation before the product is on the market.
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For almost three decades, Boston Engineering has designed, developed, and optimized devices and technologies the medical community relies on to save lives, enrich quality of life, and reduce costs to the healthcare system. We provide numerous solutions to the challenges in the adoption of surgical robotics.
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