Sustaining Strategy for the Medical Device Industry

Modular design in healthcare is a sustaining engineer's north star. It enables incremental, planned upgrades, profitably developing product variants with reduced development costs, and offering more solutions to the market for addressing a wider range of unique and specific patient wants and needs.

The automotive industry is an excellent case study demonstrating the value of modular design. The overall architecture of a car is comprised of many separate pieces or modules. The architecture, however, is not limited to one particular vehicle; its modules can extend into literally an entire dealer's showroom of cars. It is about flexibility and technology relevance.

Modular design is the way to go
 

Design that leverages modular product architecture provides the best course for healthcare OEMs to ensure their products are keeping pace with evolving healthcare changes. The entire product management strategy must have supply chain impacts and technology relevance at the forefront or risk losing traction against faster, more agile competitors.

Jabil has exposure across the many product and therapy domains in healthcare, but we are additionally deeply experienced in the transportation industry as well as consumer electronics and a vast number of other segments. This cross-Jabil perspective offers tremendous value to our healthcare customers, in effect providing eyes and ears to help ensure they don't run into component obsolescence issues, technology irrelevance or other sourcing complications which inevitably result in excessive or unplanned costs.

As a world-leading manufacturing services provider dedicated to solving complex product design and development challenges, Jabil works to make the right device architecture and technologies available at the right time; this is the competitive edge we secure for our customers through Jabil's Predictive Lifecycle Management Strategy.

Jabil invests in resources and tools to stay in the loop with healthcare and non-healthcare industry trends that impact our customers' medical devices. We leverage our supply chain ecosystem, and we develop and maintain strong relationships with key commodity and technology suppliers to monitor technology roadmaps. We use these insights to forecast when changes will occur through our next-gen supply chain optimization tool.

Additionally, to reduce reactive, unplanned re-spins when managing obsolescence, value engineering, and other product maintenance activities, Jabil works to ensure effective design for manufacturability (DfM) strategies are being planned during forecast product updates to drive even more efficiency throughout the product lifecycle.

This allows us to help our med device customers better understand and manage their real costs for sustaining engineering — not only the direct costs, but also the drag on new product innovation and the cost of inefficient processes.

Jabil has an answer for meeting requirements like this and similar customer inquiries through our expert engineering team. Together, we are one of the largest product development partners in the world, with more than 3,000 strategy, research, design, technology and engineering experts on call to help Jabil customers solve their most complex challenges and accelerate the right ideas to market while reducing risk and maximizing their return on investment.

Expectations are changing as healthcare continues its shift to a market addressing patients. In this new ecosystem, patients act more like consumers, with increased demands for what's "current" and, often, what's convenient. In-home healthcare delivery is one of the more urgent macro trends in recent years, certainly due to COVID-driven needs for remote-enabled care.

Product designs that put ease of use and human factor insights front and center are providing value far beyond simple convenience. Seamless and connected engagement for patients with their providers and ancillary support systems is a potent driver for improved adherence and compliance to treatments. This is a critical value extending to the entire ecosystem of healthcare stakeholders. Continued momentum in this direction hinges on designers and engineers being able to continue pushing back on the limits of smaller form factors.

Speaking broadly, technology-based innovations in healthcare support the improved delivery of therapy. The technology is not the therapy; it's an enhancement. And the technology is evolving at a pace distinct and more rapidly iterative than the therapy.

These same technologies are also enhancing product experiences in other industries, like consumer technology, automotive and transportation, aerospace, and the smart home. All these industries are experiencing fast-paced evolution due to connectivity and automation technologies and all are increasingly incorporating the same sensors, processors, memory, drivers and power sources for their products.

The lifecycles and road maps for these components are not created or driven by healthcare — they're driven by the faster paced, more consumer-focused industries, possibly with less regulatory requirements. Competition for what's available now is certainly critical, but recognition and insight about what's going to be available later is even more impactful.

We in healthcare must be agile with our design strategies, leveraging road map insight within and outside healthcare so we can proactively adapt and change as needed.

We've seen that seamless technology integration is key to delivering the type of predictive and preventative healthcare experiences which are increasingly becoming key to a patient's journey to increased health and wellness. The path to this future relies on emerging technologies and communication enhancements, such as 5G networks; patient care and disease state platforms built with cloud technology; and a growing roster of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices.

Intelligence — whether it's via trend watching or monitoring component markets via our supplier relationships — is the key that unlocks the value of modular design strategy and lifecycle management disciplines for our customers.

Take as an example the coordination required to migrate a product from technology A to technology B (e.g., Bluetooth® Low Energy to 5G) without significant redesign or regulatory impact or any product demand shortages. To do this migration or change seamlessly, a strategy using insight and intelligence must be defined and started at design with the appropriate architecture.