Case Study: Point-of-Care 3D Printing for Personalized Medical Devices

The medical device industry is undergoing a profound digital transformation—reshaping how products are designed, manufactured, and delivered to care teams and their patients. At the heart of this shift is direct digital manufacturing (DDM) and distributed manufacturing (DM), driven by advances in 3D printing, cloud-based design platforms, AI-driven modeling, and digital supply chains.

No longer limited to prototyping, these technologies now power faster innovation, mass customization, and real-time responsiveness to clinical needs. As hospitals and manufacturers embrace digital workflows, DDM is emerging not just as a tool, but as a catalyst for agile, data-driven medical device development, personalization, and distribution.

Ricoh, a leading provider of integrated digital services, print, and imaging solutions designed to support workplace digital transformation and optimize business performance, undertook an initiative in 2020 to leverage their expertise to identify unmet industry needs where its vision could be applied in new ways.

This effort led to the creation of Ricoh 3D for Healthcare, a division dedicated to combining digital transformation, direct digital manufacturing (DDM), and distributed manufacturing (DM) to improve personalized care. In assessing the landscape, Ricoh identified significant barriers to the adoption of DDM and DM—including skillset gaps, regulatory considerations, reliability, and supplier consistency. Ricoh recognized its unique position in the personalized medical device space to help overcome these challenges and, together with industry partners, advance direct digital and distributed manufacturing of mass-customized medical devices.

One example of Ricoh 3D for Healthcare’s digital transformation is the creation of a Point-of-Care medical device manufacturing facility co-located at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist. This initiative included the deployment of digital workflows that integrate directly into healthcare professionals’ normal workstreams, advanced multi-material anatomic modeling, and automation that resulted in an 80% reduction in device design time and a 40% improvement in lead time.

In this first part of a two-part series, we discuss the challenges in technology, materials, systems, and regulations specific to digital transformation in mass-customized medical devices, as well as the solutions and advancements that are enabling a paradigm shift in how these devices are manufactured and made more widely available for patient care.