Outsourcing of Medical Device Manufacturing Processes Enabling Faster Product Development

With the rising incidence of chronic diseases and the surging healthcare expenditure of several countries, the demand for medical devices is shooting up across the world. For instance, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), cancer caused the deaths of 9.6 million people and it was the second biggest cause of death across the world. Furthermore, the organization found the around 422 million people around the world are living with diabetes, and the disease is responsible for 1.6 million deaths every year.

Additionally, as per an article published in the Cardiac Failure Review, 5.7 million heart failures were reported in the U.S. in 2016, and this number is expected to rise to 8 million by 2030. As a result of the rising incidence of these diseases, many medical device manufacturers are outsourcing the production processes as it helps them reduce cost and save time. Moreover, in order to manage maintenance and quality control, medical device manufacturers are outsourcing the production operations to various contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs) located in South Korea, China, and Taiwan.

Outsourcing of product development processes to various CMOs not only reduces the manufacturing time, but it also enables better handling of operations and machineries as the time required for hiring experts and then training them on how to operate the equipment is saved at manufacturers’ end. Additionally, hiring full-service contract manufacturers in the development and design phase of a product further reduces the manufacturing time, which, in turn, allows manufacturers to accept more orders.

This is ascribed to the surging requirement for affordable electronic medical device products. General medical devices, radiology, cardiovascular, and orthopedics & spine are the major application areas of medical devices. Out of these, the usage of these devices is expected to rise sharply in cardiovascular applications in the upcoming years, owing to the increasing incidence of cardiovascular diseases across the world.

Geographically, North America is predicted to dominate the medical device outsourcing market in the forthcoming years. Europe is expected to be the second biggest regional market in the coming years. This will be because of the existence of a large geriatric population and several well-established medical device manufacturing outsourcing companies in the regions. The popularity of outsourcing medical device manufacturing processes is also expected to surge in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America, Middle East, and Africa regions in the coming years.

Hence, it can be safely said that the outsourcing of medical device manufacturing processes by medical device manufacturers will increase significantly in the coming years, primarily because of the growing requirement for faster product manufacturing processes, rising incidence of chronic diseases, and surging geriatric population across the world.