Stryker: Mergers, Product design and Life cycle management

In 2021, Stryker acquired Gauss Surgical, a medical device company that has developed Triton, an artificial intelligence-enabled platform for real-time monitoring of blood loss in sponges and canisters during surgery, enabling early detection of post-partum hemorrhage. It is believed that Triton technology will help improve the industry standards for quantifying blood loss in the labor and delivery department, furthering Stryker’s commitment to improve safety and outcomes for our caregivers and their patients. Stryker’s Sustainability Solutions business provides reprocessing services for single-use medical devices. Reprocessing of single-use medical devices lowers expenses by 25 to 30 percent without compromising quality or safety.

Medical waste is a growing problem. The average hospital generates 29 pounds of waste per bed every day, and this volume has only increased with the coronavirus, amplifying demand for single-use items. Improper management of discarded medical waste poses a health risk to the public, patients, healthcare professionals and waste management workers.   To help address these issues, Stryker Sustainability Solutions business provides reprocessing services for single-use medical devices, which reduces waste and extends the useful life of these products.

As the leading provider of these services, Sustainability Solutions safely collects items at hospitals; sorts, disassembles and repairs damaged parts when necessary; then cleans devices. We then inspect, test, package and sterilize devices before shipping them back to the customer for clinical use. More than 21 types of devices spanning thousands of SKUs are collected and reprocessed, thereby diverting waste from landfills and helping to support a circular economy. In 2021, Sustainability Solutions became the first Stryker business to begin using vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP) sterilization on a portion of our patient care devices. VHP is a nontoxic alternative to ethylene oxide (EO) sterilization, and Sustainability Solutions has set a goal to reduce EO usage by 20 percent by 2025.

In addition to minimizing waste at a product’s end of life, Sustainability Solutions launched the Redesigned for Sustainability initiative to address impacts throughout the entire product lifecycle. This initiative was developed with valuable input from our customers who helped us identify six priority areas: sourcing, manufacturing, component design, material and chemical use, waste solutions and packaging. To support this effort, the business provided training to their new product development teams. The trainings were specially tailored to each team to showcase concrete ways they could incorporate sustainable design elements into existing and future projects.

Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, is another approach to product design that reduces environmental impact by leveraging more efficient material usage, better product designs and more sustainable supply chain transportation. AMagine is Stryker’s proprietary approach to creating implants using AM, which we have honed over the last 20 years. Beyond reducing waste, AMagine enables the execution of previously difficult or impossible product designs. They have developed new products across multiple businesses using this technology and sell more metal orthopaedic implants using AM technology than any other medical device company in the world. 

In 2021, Stryker participated in the Chemical Footprint Project to share our governance on chemical management across our supply chain, products and packaging, and manufacturing processes. They also joined the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council, a private technical coalition of industry peers across healthcare, recycling and waste management industries seeking to improve recyclability of plastic products and packaging within the healthcare industry