It was exciting to see that a leading 2D printing company is making strides in the 3D printing space. Last week, Ricoh USA has partnered with Stratasys to provide point-of-care anatomical modeling services to healthcare facilities.
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| Anatomical model of a spine printed on the Stratasys J750 Digital Anatomy Printer |
Ricoh’s healthcare division will use Stratasys 3D printing technology as part its HIPAA-compliant solution, RICOH 3D for Healthcare, to give more medical facilities access to 3D-printed, patient-specific anatomical models. This can help with surgical preparation, patient education, and medical training.
According to Ricoh, its end-to-end workflow simplifies the development, design, and production of anatomical models. This, in turn, reduces key barriers to using 3D medical models for healthcare providers (especially smaller providers), including:
The partnership news follows Ricoh’s August 31 announcement of its solution, which emphasized its integration with IBM Connect Access from IBM Watson Health (which a customer would need for the Ricoh/Stratasys solution)—an enterprise imaging solution many healthcare providers already use.
Customers have the option of having the Stratasys printers and Ricoh’s managed services staff on-site or having the models shipped by mail. Ricoh and Stratasys also indicated that the companies will continue to expand their partnership and redefine how healthcare facilities access anatomic models for personalized patient care.
After reading this news, I immediately thought of a recent conversation I had with Andrew DiLaura, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at CADimensions (an authorized reseller of SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD solutions and Stratasys 3D printers in the Northeast). DiLaura saw medical models as one of the top applications for 3D printing, noting that healthcare organizations can use CT scan data to mimic a patient’s actual bone structure or condition, print mockups of the patient, and practice surgery on the model prior to seeing the patient.
He noted, however, that this practice was mainly occurring in university and research settings—something that Ricoh and Stratasys have taken into consideration with their “cost-effective solution [that] expands access for healthcare providers of all sizes.”
Another takeaway from this news is that Ricoh is expanding its managed services capabilities with this solution offering. As mentioned above, one version of the solution includes its managed services staff on site. As we noted in our Market Insights: Managed Services Study last year, Ricoh offers a robust array of managed print, business process, and IT services. In fact, the company achieved top-notch scores across each of these areas. And in the area of business process services, we were especially impressed with its Intelligent Business Platform: an evolving library of services focused on workflow and process automation, document digitization, and intelligence capture.
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| Ricoh Managed Services Scoring |
While Ricoh 3D for Healthcare may fall outside the traditional document arena we tend to cover, we believe that Ricoh’s services competencies in the 2D print, document, and IT spaces can only help it perform in a managed services capacity for HIPAA-compliant 3D design, workflow, and printing.
For more information on 3D print, head to The Key Point Blog and The Key Point Podcast. Also, stay tuned for some exciting announcements regarding Keypoint Intelligence’s involvement in the 3D print space.
