Accelerating Product Development in the Age of Digital Innovation

Historically, medical devices and healthcare products have had long lifespans and development cycles, but the emergence of digital healthcare has accelerated the pace and has put a premium on speed and innovation in product development.
 
The market’s shift to incorporate digital, ‘connected care’ capabilities and other advanced, technology-driven enhancements has put pressure on medical device companies to be more agile, strategic, and informed to keep up with the accelerating pace of technologies transforming their industry.
 
Safety, quality and improving clinical outcomes continue to be preeminent must-haves for medical device OEMs, as is reducing cost. Finally, there’s also the inputs and demands of the patient, or end-user, who has become a vital and necessary checkpoint for healthcare product designers seeking to ensure relevance and preference for their products and solutions in an increasingly socially-enhanced marketplace ecosystem.
 
What’s a winning product development and technology strategy for medical device manufacturers facing the full spectrum of these challenges?
 
I’ve posed this question, and more, to kick off an engaged discussion about innovations in the medical device and healthcare products industry.

Why are shorter product development cycles becoming so important for customers?

Technology and innovation are driving rapid changes in health-related products and services. Interdependent stakeholders across the industry — providers, payers, regulators and, of course, patients — are adopting and supporting powerful new ways to deliver better, more personalized treatment.
 
Competing and sustaining in their legacy markets, maintaining relevance, and being a step ahead as their portfolio changes, these are enormous pressures for traditional healthcare OEMs. It’s competitive out there! A recent Jabil survey of healthcare industry trends found that 62% of the participants said their production cycles have gotten at least 50% faster in the past five years.
 
To accommodate these competitive risks most effectively, their whole development cycle must be agile, and robust enough to not lose a step delivering on the technology side, while also being cost-effective. And all of it balanced in addressing unrelenting time-to-the-market pressure.

What are some of strategies for device makers seeking to minimize risk in this environment?

Making a product competitive is all about having a proactive and predictive development strategy with an eye to the larger macro trends of the market as well as supply chain impacts. Predictive planning protects and builds upon a customer’s competitive edge by addressing the speed of technological innovation, ensuring component availability, and incorporating changes to the product roadmap ahead — all in preparation for accelerating our customer’s competitive advantage.
 
Modular design is one way to address disrupting long-lifecycle products. As devices increasingly rely on technology, OEMs should consider designing their products such that common underlying components are grouped together and can be upgraded as needed. This also helps minimize regulatory process delays, speeding up the development cycle and getting new versions of the product to market more quickly.

What are some of the investments you can make to better address accelerating lifecycles for customers?

At Jabil Healthcare, we are investing in both people and improving our processes.
 
The advantage of having multiple sectors and multi-disciplined engineers involved in a project is that they tend to approach problems differently. Clarity emerges through a rich compliment of perspectives: Consumer, Industrial, Networking and Cloud.
 
The deployment of fully connected health devices in recent decades has prompted the development of smaller, smarter, and more sophisticated medical electronics. Modern systems must be highly versatile yet reliable, addressing market requisites for wireless communication, wearability, and portability.
 
Most importantly, however, medical electronics must be able to properly analyze, manage, and secure health data transmitted to/from patient devices, transmission equipment, and the Cloud.
 
Advanced capabilities in miniaturization, optics, mechatronics, just to name a few, as well as developing reference designs so we can offer turnkey solutions for our customers’ future needs. And of course, streamlining product lifecycle management processes with an eye towards improved sustainability for end-of-life electronics hardware, in other words, managing a product’s lifecycle from design to dust.

What are some specific technologies that have emerged as must-have competencies?

Leveraging connected, digital technology together with minimally invasive medical devices and high-performance optics technology has healthcare poised at an exceptional moment for delivering on concepts that have for years seemed the purview of medical futurists.
 
The number speak for themselves. The global connected healthcare market is expected to reach $52 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 18% between 2020 and 2027. In addition, MarketsandMarkets estimates that the minimally invasive device market will be worth $32.7 billion by 2025.
 
Among other technology investments, we are investing in video processing capabilities to improve overall imaging quality, including latency performance, throughput, and number of processing steps. These will provide modular turnkey solutions for our customers across product domains, such as surgical devices, minimally invasive devices, surgical robotics and diagnostic imaging as well as potentially for any device with sensors and diagnostic capabilities.

What’s ‘Old’ is ‘New’ Again

I’ve been working with sensors and sensor integration for years now within medical devices. Think of the basic fitness tracker: biometrics measuring, accelerometers for fall detection etc. These capabilities have been around a long time.
 
But let me tell you, at this year’s CES, one of the biggest trends in 2022 was Sensors. It was amazing to see the creative development for leveraging this basic, but invaluable technology.
 
The healthtech keynote featured one of the industry’s largest OEMs essentially discussing a sensor technology-based pivot from one market into an adjacent one – leveraging the sophisticated technology of a Diabetes Type 2 sensor into a new line of consumer biowearables intended for more general fitness and wellness purposes.
 
With continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), the patient places a small device on the back of their arm, and it continuously measures blood sugar. It’s a super easy way for patients to measure their glucose levels. But now they’ve made it so a person can measure and manage their own weight loss and diet and fitness performance through the monitoring of substances like glucose, lactate, ketones (for all the people on a ketone diet) and eventually alcohol in the body, through a sensor worn on the user’s arm.
 
So, this is a really wonderful example of a long existing product – a diabetes sensor – which as a regulated product, has a very long lifecycle, and putting it into a consumer product which will leverage the same manufacturing platform and with a much shorter lifecycle. There’s a win-win in this all around the board, with such great technology scaling and improving the lives of a dramatically expanded user group and at lowered costs for the OEM and the consumer…and likely lowering health costs through better health management.
 

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As the Head of Engineering and Technology across Jabil Healthcare, Ralph Hugeneck leads a global engineering team and implementation professionals working together to solve Jabil customers’ most complex product design and development challenges.
 
A graduate of Vienna Technical University, Hugeneck holds several degrees, including a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering as well as a degree in biomedical engineering.