Ximedica Expanding Both Inside and Out

Currently housed in an 80,000-square-foot facility, Ximedica is expanding into an area of its building that previously had been sublet. The expansion project is expected to be completed early next year.

The 25-year-old company also operates an office in Hong Kong, China, to support its outsourcing effort to Asia, but there currently are no plans to expand that facility.

Besides its aesthetic transformation, Ximedica is undergoing an expansion of its services as well. The company recently launched a new healthcare initiative designed to help medical device designers and manufacturers better understand the ways in which their products are used by healthcare providers and patients. To oversee efforts in this area, Ximedica created a new group called Human Centered Healthcare Services. The group, according to a news release issued by the company, is charged with using a “human centered design approach to help healthcare providersovercome complex challenges affecting the safety, efficiency, and quality of care delivery.” Put more simply, the company is going to help hospitals improve efficiency and reduce errors.

“Nobody has ever looked holistically at the [healthcare] system and applied the product development process to hospitals’ processes,” Dan Reifsteck, Ximedica’s chief operating officer, told Medical Product
Outsourcing. “This initiative will help us solve any potential problems with a product before it gets to the patient. It will also help to ensure the useability of a product by healthcare professionals and that’s important.”

The company’s entry into the provider side of healthcare is a natural extension of the company’s experience working in clinical environments to help clients develop new products, executives said. Ximedica will draw upon many of the same disciplines used in product development—namely, observational research, human factors, systems design, and quality engineering—to help improve hospital care.

“Our firsthand experience on the frontlines of care, observing clinical proceduresin all kinds of situations, has given us insights into the many challenges facing hospitals today,” remarked Aidan Petrie, Ximedica co-founder and chief innovation officer. “As we seek ways to help our device clients design and deliver products to better serve clinicians and patients, we also see opportunities to use our skills and expertise to help make improvements to delivery systems as well. These are dynamic and complex environments, where variation is often the norm and there are many risks for everything from miscommunications to injury. A human-centered design approach is one that embraces that variation and uses human factors disciplines to provide solutions based on how people want, and need, to work in order to accomplish their tasks safely and effectively.”

Ximedica has hired Kristin Simoens to lead the Healthcare Services group. She most recently worked as a marketing director for Advanced Wound Care at Covidien plc.