1. Environmental sustainability: Taking responsibility for the Planet
As a manufacturer of remanufactured medical devices, resource conservation is a top priority for us. Through remanufacturing, we extend the lifespan of medical products to maximise their use. The renowned Fraunhofer Institute study (2021) 1 clearly demonstrated the ecological benefits of this approach. Researchers calculated the resource consumption and life cycle assessment of electrophysiology catheters and their impact on global warming. The results are remarkable: Referencing a single functional unit, medical remanufacturing of electrophysiology catheters reduces the carbon footprint by more than 50 percent and resource consumption by over 28 percent compared to new production.
2. Economic sustainability: Future-proof through innovation
Remanufacturing not only reduces emissions but also postively impacts on cost planning in hospitals and clinics. Highly complex and expensive medical devices, when remanufactured, are equivalent in quality to newly produced ones but come at a significantly lower purchase price. With increasing financial pressures on healthcare institutions, choosing remanufactured medical devices helps conserve both ecological and financial resources.
These savings provide hospitals with new financial flexibility, enabling them to allocate their budgets more efficiently and strategically. In 2020, public hospitals in Germany were left with less than ten euros for every 100 euros of revenue to invest in digitalisation, maintenance, or financing. Saving money in one area allows more funds to be available for necessary transformations in another.
3. Social Sustainability: Putting people first
At Vanguard AG, we play a key role in ensuring the security of healthcare supply through remanufacturing. Heart catheter procedures are among the most common inpatient interventions in German hospitals, with annual figures ranging from around 875,000 to 1,200,000.2,3 The production of electrophysiology catheters, in particular, requires rare raw materials sourced from across the globe. Therefore, extending the use of medical devices is not only beneficial for environmental reasons but also to ensure supply security.
The global Covid-19 pandemic highlighted how vulnerable supply chains can be. Thanks to remanufacturing at our German production facilities, supply disruptions were avoided, allowing patients to continue receiving treatment. Ultimately, this is the most important aspect of healthcare: People and their optimal care.
