It goes without saying that the medical industry is among the fastest-growing industry on the planet. Now, thanks to rapid prototyping, medical product design and development has become faster and much more convenient, letting you create innovative prototypes under quick turnarounds.
Even still there are a majority of medical companies that design their products based on a sample initial idea. They do it without moving toward testing and real-world evaluation which puts them into a high risk.
Therefore, it’s more important to let your medical device go through several phases of prototyping during the design and development process before the final design is finalized.
In this blog, we’re going to find out why medical prototyping or Instrument prototyping is so crucial to the entire industry and why you should utilize medical prototyping or instrument prototyping during the design phase of your surgical or fitness device.
But before we dig in, here’s a refresher on Medical Prototyping:
What is Medical Prototyping?
To put it simply, medical prototyping is a prototyping technique of producing functional samples of your medical device as per the exact design and material specifications to be used either for product testing or business presentation purposes.
Once created, these samples let the manufacturers look for flaws in your design and corroborate its manufacturability. It also gives you a hint on whether your design requires any alternations or changes before it’s brought to the final production and distribution stage.
Medical prototyping can be done to achieve both: Development of new medical devices as well as enhancing already existing ones.
The Importance of Prototyping in Medical Product Design & Instrument Product Design
As a medical company dealing in health technology products, surgical equipment, and systems, doing medical prototyping is crucial for your product’s design.
With medical prototyping, you can easily create alpha or beta samples of your healthcare products, test them to measure overall performance in the real world, and improve products further before final delivery.
With that said, here’s are some pointers that make medical prototyping important:
Functionality: Medical prototyping is crucial if you want to test whether your medical device is able to perform the intended task or not and to a high degree of perfection.
Manufacturability: Medical prototyping lets you gauge how practical or cost-effective your product is and how effectively and optimally it can be manufactured.
Regulations: Medical prototyping is also important if you want to verify whether your product adheres to regulations in the location it will be sold. For example, a certain state in the US or in a whole continent like Europe.
What’s the Process of Medical Prototyping?
The process of medical prototyping runs through four key stages name Alpha, Beta, Pilot, and Completion.
- Alpha: In the first prototyping stage, the replica created is usually a non-functioning one. The Alpha stage’s main purpose is to reduce the production cost and test the product dimensions of the medical device being made.
- Beta: In the beta stage, the prototypes are created using more streamlined manufacturing processes. Though being functional, beta prototypes lack the aesthetics of the finalized product. Thus, manufacturers use them to check the overall functionality or any flaws present in the design.
- Pilot: During the Pilot stage manufacturers create prototypes that are similar to their beta counterparts but look more similar to the final product i.e. they encompass the aesthetics absent in the beta stage. These prototypes are made with accurate design and material specifications in mind and are mostly suited for clinical trails or pre-launches.
- Completion: In this stage, manufacturers create the final product based on modifications done to earlier prototypes.
Now that you’re aware of the nitty-gritty of medical prototyping, let’s understand how beneficial it can be for your product.
Benefits of Medical Prototyping
Here’s how medical prototyping can add value to your product:
Gives You a Better Understanding about Your Product
This is arguably the best thing about medical prototyping. From start to finish, it gives you thorough insights about your product and what makes it unique.
You can gain a much fresher perspective on the inner workings of your product. Not just that, you can also unravel key areas of improvements as well as let engineers understand the overall manufacturability of your product.
Saves Plenty of Time
Medical prototyping techniques, such as 3D Printing, make the entire trial and error process much more productive.
Instead of sending your sketches to manufacturers and having them send the physical mockup to you, you can have a product design company create 3D printed prototypes. This will help you save several hours of time, efforts and valuable resources.
Increases Revenue
Those who make use of medical prototyping successfully establish a regulated quality control model. This helps them eliminate the risks of any unwanted issues during manufacturing.
What’s more, it helps them speed up the approval process, enable developers to free up resources and make way for new projects which result in a revenue boost.
Final Thoughts
As you can tell, doing medical prototyping can be a lot more promising. With the key insights gathered, it can help you create a product that’s user-friendly, robust, and which meets all the necessary compliance regulations.
If you are looking for a medical prototyping company to handle your medical prototyping needs, we’ll be more than happy to be one.
We are a reputed medical product design company ourselves that offers medical design services and has helped businesses launch innovative medical devices in the market through our prototyping expertise.