Custom Medical Device Design for Manufacturability

The design and development of custom medical devices can be costly, challenging, and complex—especially when it comes to innovative, custom-engineered products with very specific application requirements. However, with the right partners and the right strategy, you can bring custom, cost-effective medical devices to market that meet (and exceed) every performance requirement. Here’s how.

1. Enlisting Expert Support from Start to Finish

It’s not enough to secure expert guidance in the later stages of a project, such as when it’s actually time to manufacture various components and finished devices. Whether you’re designing a catheter, sheath and dilator sets, sutures and fibers, or another custom medical device entirely, you need an end-to-end solution provider with the expertise to get your great idea off the drawing board and into the market.

Quite simply, you need expert support from start to finish. By putting the work in at the beginning of a custom medical device project—from the earliest concept development stage—you can streamline the entire process to accelerate cost-effective device development and innovation.

The highly qualified engineers, material and polymer experts, and skilled technicians at Teleflex Medical OEM can enhance your design, develop prototypes, and scale-up for manufacturing. As a result, you can develop tailor-made solutions for existing problems and emerging medical innovations with a team that feels like a natural extension of your own research and development department and operations staff.

2. Designing for Manufacturability and Performance

Rather than designing a custom medical device and then hoping it can be brought to fruition, we recommend starting from scratch with a focus on design for manufacturability and performance. That means designing your custom medical device with multiple factors in mind that only an expert would know to consider, such as:

• Guidance for PTFE-lined catheters
• Reinforcement performance data (PPI, wire size, patterns, and more)
• Material selection and performance results
• Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (OD/ID/Length)
• Quality and inspection standards

At Teleflex Medical OEM, our EPIC (Engineering, Prototyping, Innovation, Collaboration) Medtec® Centers bring together a multidisciplinary team of industry experts and advanced technologies to design for cost-effective manufacturing and optimal performance across various applications. Working together at one of our three EPIC Medtec® Centers, we can identify challenges and find solutions, all the while controlling design concept development and production costs.

We provide the help you need to reduce project risk and build a device using proven, in-house platforms. Throughout our highly collaborative process, we work with our partners to brainstorm out-of-the-box solutions, share innovative ideas, question assumptions, develop demonstrative prototypes, and gather feedback.

The result? Product concepts that target your well-understood objectives, challenges, and application requirements—all developed with a focus on its manufacturability and a solid understanding of the limits of the core technologies being used to manufacture it.

After the concept stage is complete, you can rely on us to take your idea through every phase of development and production. Our IDEA (Innovation, Development, Engineering Accelerator) Medtec® Process includes:

• Toleranced concept drawings
• A draft bill of materials (BOM) for each prototype
• An outline of technical risks/challenges for each concept
• Cost and lead-time quotes for initial development build

3. Partnering with Industry Experts at Teleflex Medical OEM

By enlisting expert support early—preferably from the initial product concept development—and designing for manufacturability, you can make your great medical device idea a reality.

You just need expert guidance to make it happen, and that’s where we come in. Get in touch to learn how we can put our expertise, vertically-integrated services, and unrivaled capabilities to work, both for you and your own product development team.