When it comes to making parts for lifesaving medical devices, customization is king. Proterial Cable America High Performance Medical Solutions (PCA-HPMS) has the ability to take a customer’s medical OE engineering spec and design medical extrusion or cable components for the surgical, catheter, endoscopy and ultrasound markets.
The High Performance Medical Solutions (HPMS) team at PCA is a global contract manufacturer for Medical OEMs worldwide. Our team is flexible enough to efficiently create reliable and precise parts based on the specifications the customer submits, which is why our medical solutions team is so customer-friendly.
While there are limitless possibilities for the parts that the team can make, they do tend to fall into different categories. The vast majority of the High Performance Medical Solutions parts are made in the Rhode Island and Connecticut locations and fall under medical extrusion, high pressure braided tubing, or medical cable.
In addition, many secondary operations such as tipping, printing, precision cutting, adhesive bonding and more, as well as kitting and assembly are options for customers.
Norbert Ansay, who is the engineer in charge of research and development on the medical solutions team, says there is a range of products made by PCA for medical devices. Depending on the customer, we may be creating something familiar or something brand new.
“There are families of parts that are similar—there can be 10 or 15 different sizes of the same part, or maybe with a different length,” he says. “Some are sort of a generation 2 of an item we already make, while with others we start from scratch.”
In fact, sometimes parts are so customized that they require original tooling to be made, and at PCA, we are able to make custom tooling in our High Performance Defense Solutions machine shop.
Our medical solutions extrusions are manufactured in a certified 30,000 square foot clean room at the Rhode Island plant which means that operators are wearing shoe covers, gowns and hairnets.
Clean rooms are classified by how clean the air is in the space and at our HPMS location, the clean rooms are ISO Class 8 and ISO Class 9. These clean rooms won’t have any of the dust, hair, oil, grease or anything else that can typically be found on a factory floor.
In addition, the water used is tested monthly and changed.
“It’s a must have for packaging,” Norbert says. “And it’s going above and beyond doing the extrusion in the clean room.”
Ultimately, the goal with the HPMS team is to get the customer exactly what they need. With that in mind, our research and development lab offers our customers the chance to work directly with engineers and operators to make real-time adjustments and modifications to designs, which speeds up problem-solving and production time.
In fact, a customer can rent the lab, with a dedicated staff and with access to our advanced tooling. That way a customer looking for highly customized medical components can have their ideas turned into reality.
Using the lab, customers can count on a final product that meets their requirements but also complies with the rigorous standards of the medical field.
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PCA efficiently generates products for our customers, but we’re always looking for ways to streamline. Right now, we’re working to revamp and implement rapid prototyping that would get prototyped extrusions in the system, in research and development, and in our customers’ hands in 2-3 weeks.
Currently, when customers get to the paperwork stage, they need to fill out information about the product that is hard to answer without having the product created. This can lead to holdups in the paperwork leading to longer timeframes.
The new method would allow some of these hurdles to be jumped while keeping everything aligned in the quality system. The goal would be to get to testing faster leading to quicker adjustments from the customer and the best possible configuration and profile for commercial success being produced.
It can be easy to lose the forest for the trees when you see the tubing or cable that is produced by PCA. But what are these parts being used for?
Our in-house tubing and cable solutions goes into surgical equipment, a wide variety of catheters, endoscopes and ultrasound machines. The products the PCA medical solutions team makes are vital, integral pieces of life-saving devices.
Proterial Cable America is a reliable and trustworthy medical solutions manufacturer. We can accommodate whatever your needs are, and look forward to helping you. Click here to see what we offer.
