XIMEDICA HOSTS EVENT TO SHOWCASE BEST PRACTICES IN COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION

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XIMEDICA HOSTS EVENT TO SHOWCASE BEST PRACTICES IN COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION IN MEDICAL DEVICES AND HEALTHCARE 

MIX 2010 draws hundreds of healthcare leaders from around the region to share ideas and best practices, as Ximedica’s continued growth evidences strength the medical technology economy.

Providence, RI, May 10, 2010 -- Ximedica’s eighty thousand square foot medical product design and manufacturing center became a gathering place for hundreds of healthcare innovators and leaders from around the New England region on May 6th, as the company hosted its first ever Medical Innovation Exchange (MIX) event. The event, first conceived by the company as a means to encourage greater knowledge sharing and collaboration among various professional disciplines within the company, also included many of the company’s clients, business partners, and key industry and local business leaders.  Nearly two hundred guests spent an afternoon interacting with each other and with many of Ximedica’s professional staff who had created exhibits to showcase various state of the art methods, processes, and tools for integrated product development and manufacture of medical technology and consumer healthcare. The open nature of the event reflected Ximedica’s principles and proven methods of collaboration that it uses to assist its clients in developing and launching market-driven clinical and consumer healthcare products.

Those clients include global leaders in medical devices, consumer healthcare, and healthcare services, as well as many growth stage medical technology companies. Ximedica provides its clients with outsourced research, product and services design and development, clinical and regulatory services, and manufacturing services from pilot to full scale production. On display at the MIX event were interactive exhibits that highlighted various components of Ximedica’s expertise, including ethnographic research to discover and define user needs, human factors design, comprehensive engineering process and usability testing, optimized lean development tools, collaborative brainstorming, quality, and pilot manufacturing. Participants added much to the discussion of how these tools can be applied and envisioned ways in which they might be pushed further in the future to meet the ever increasing challenges of the healthcare industry.

“Ximedica has grown significantly over the past two years and continues to grow. We need to make sure that we are always finding innovative ways to mine and share the depth of talent and expertise we have among our staff,” commented Aidan Petrie, Ximedica’s Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer. “We want all of our people to have a thorough awareness of what their peers do in other parts of the organization, to get the full benefits of our collaborative and innovative culture. Since our clients and business partners are the direct beneficiaries of our knowledge base, we wanted them to participate in this event to both learn and contribute to the open innovation effort.”

Of particular note was the unveiling of Ximedica’s new and proprietary SOP system, specifically designed for human use. Under its ISO 13845 certified design control system, Ximedica’s stringent quality controls are reflected in dozens of critical Standard Operating Procedures. Crucial to employee training and regulatory compliance, many of these SOPs contain dozens of pages of procedural steps and technical information. About a year ago, Ximedica saw an opportunity to apply its own human factors expertise to redesign and rewrite its entire SOP system to optimize its usability. The result has been a dramatic improvement in the way content is organized, displayed, cross-referenced, and updated. The company expects to see significant gains in efficiency and training effectiveness as a result.

The evening also included several short, inspiring speeches that spoke to the relevance of collaborative innovation in the healthcare industry and also the strength of the knowledge economy in Rhode Island.  The list of guest speakers included Al Verrecchia, Chairman of the Board of Lifespan; Clyde Briant, Vice President for Research at Brown University; Roger Darois, Vice President of Research and Advanced Technologies for the Davol division of C.R. Bard; and Stephen Costantino, Rhode Island State Representative and Chairman of the House Finance Committee.

Each speaker made brief remarks reflecting their own unique viewpoint on the common theme of uniting the state’s industry, academic, and healthcare delivery assets to drive economic growth. Verrecchia, who is also the former CEO of Hasbro, reflected on how that company achieved success by viewing its products as intellectual properties that could be expanded in many new directions. Verrecchia then drew parallels to the possibilities created by taking a broad view of technology and by harnessing the power of collaboration between academia and private industry. “There aren’t many places in the country where, like Providence, one can find institutions of the caliber of Brown, RISD, and URI as well as leading healthcare providers like Lifespan and Care New England, all within a mile of each other. We need to capitalize on that.”

Roger Darois later described Davol’s firsthand experience in leveraging such partnerships as a device maker achieving double digital annual growth through new product innovation. “Innovation requires good people and good partnerships. In addition to our own teams, we work with outside firms like Ximedica as well as the universities and clinicians. We need to be discovering what the clinicians need next, and developing the technology that will enable us to meet those needs. We make it happen by connecting all these forces. This kind of collaboration is what that will really make this healthcare economy happen.”

Ximedica Co-founder and CEO Stephen Lane summed up the spirit of the evening by further emphasizing the importance of co-development to the future of the company as well as the overall economy. “We see tremendous opportunities in finding new and better ways to connect industry, academia, and providers like Lifespan. Ximedica is not just focused on its own growth, but also on its role in further establishing Rhode Island as a national model for excellence in healthcare research, innovation, and delivery. We are finding ways to do that more effectively every day, and that is creating new opportunities that wouldn’t have been thought possible even a few years ago.”

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About Ximedica

Ximedica provides expert research, product development, regulatory, and advanced manufacturing services to leading medical and healthcare companies. We help our clients create and sustain profitable new business by developing user-focused new products and getting them to market successfully.

Ximedica is ISO 13485:2003 certified and FDA registered. Our facilities include an 80,000 square foot integrated R&D and manufacturing center in Providence, RI, as well as a satellite office in Hong Kong. Our staff is comprised of highly experienced professionals in all aspects of research, development, and manufacturing, from both within and outside of the medical field.

Today, we serve many of the world's most respected and innovative companies in the industry. We develop deep and lasting client partnerships based on shared responsibility and success.  For more information, visit www.ximedica.com. 

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