We’re On The Road

Van der Stahl Scientific is coming to your town to talk about sterile device packaging compliance. 

DP-150 Dye Penetration Tester

With nearly 20 years of experience in sterile device packaging, we have learned some important lessons and these lessons have engendered new products to serve the sterile barrier process. Let us visit your parking lot and show you how our technology can help your company's sterile packaging program stay compliant.. Find out more about our rescue 483 project, by clicking this link.


Meet Charlie

After graduating with a Business and Management degree from The University of Redlands, Charlie continued his education at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, focusing on an expanding interest in medical devices.

[Charlie A. Webb]

Charlie began his device career with MicroDynamics, an innovative ophthalmic micro surgical firm. Charlie was key in developing new distribution in Western Europe and South America.

During his time at MicroDynamics, Charlie took a new interest in mechanical engineering. Despite Charlie’s duty as VP of sales and marketing, he spent a great deal of time co-developing a host of devices for the emerging industry of refractive surgery. Charlie is a certified management consultant through The Institute of Management Consultants, a certified packaging professional, certified through the Institute of Packaging Professionals and had great success in helping startup companies reach the managed healthcare venue. Charlie holds two US patents for medical packaging equipment as well as two additional pending patents.


Packaging Blog

The medical device industry has become very dynamic. As the industry moves quickly with emerging medical device technologies, so, too, regulatory agencies move rapidly to respond.

Jennifer Dean

Van der Stahl Scientific keeps a close eye to sterile device packaging and provides insights on our medical packaging blog. Visit our blog regularly to gain a clear perspective surrounding sterile device packaging. Meet Jennifer Dean, our blog editor. She, along with our engineering group, contributes to our expanding blog. This year, the sterile device packaging blog will include additional issues outside of sterile packaging that relate to medical device manufacturing. Learn More


About This Blog

Our blog is an eclectic mix of topics surrounding medical device packaging. We also touch on a host of other issues covering the broader area of healthcare. Our goal is to share industry news with our medical device-manufacturing customers. Please visit regularly as we update often and we invite you to comment as your thoughts make a more robust and relevant thread. If there is a topic you would like covered then please visit our "contact us" page and send us your request. Remember that this is a casual blog and the accuracy of content has not been verified.

More Bells and Whistles

September 30, 2011  |  Packaging  |  No Comments

by Charlie A. Webb CPP, CMC
Staff Writer

For those of you that follow Van der Stahl Scientific’s packaging blog you may remember a while back, I wrote a blog about bells and whistles. When I penned that last blog, my hope was that the marketing department would leave engineering alone in our industry and that machine manufacturers would focus in on only usable machine attributes and not bells and whistles. But alas, it seems that I was wrong. In fact, it seems like the trend has gained some momentum and more companies are moving toward touch screen displays and proprietary functions that are designed to create an oooh and aaahhh factor at trade shows. Now, don’t get me wrong. As I’ve mentioned before, I love technology that is thick with features. I’m a ham radio operator and can comfortably sit in my easy chair and read a technical manual cover to cover. I gain great joy in learning about features of my latest electronic gadget. But this isn’t an iPad or an all-band amateur radio. It’s a medical packaging machine and it’s regulated by jaundiced third parties.

When we create too much complexity in machinery with the initial goal of simplicity, we end up with so much data scatter it is impossible to manage, and  it is extremely difficult for a third party to interpret. Further, as I had mentioned in an earlier blog, “Don’t Ask a Barber if You Need a Haircut,” you must be careful about gaining confidence in a machinery by asking a machine if it performing as expected, think HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey. As Ronald Reagan said, “Trust but Verify.” Or as the Texans like to say, “Trust your neighbor, but brand your cattle.”

We have simply focus away from the spirt of validation and the scientific method for that mater when we try to integrate validation within a machine itself. The machine must be compliant to 11607, and every machine that we offer to the medical device manufacturing community meets those robust rigors of the FDA and the ISO 11607.

Our company has taken a very different approach to determining if a machine is working as expected and it’s all centered around whether or not the seal is strong. We don’t ask the customers to believe we’ve created a compliant seal. We believe the customers need to verify that the machine has created a compliant seal. This isn’t marketing, it’s the law. This is why we have sealers that integrate peel testing on the sealer it self, as it is output data that makes or breaks your validation. (more…)

The Paralysis of Analysis

August 30, 2011  |  Packaging  |  No Comments

by Charlie A. Webb CPP, CMC
Staff Writer

I am one of the most thorough people I know. Some may say a little anal retentive. When I leave my desk at night, everything is put away. And my lucky, trusty Green Cross pen is set at a 45 degree angle on a clean, white piece of paper. But I’m perfect for my job. After all we’re in an industry of details. The little things matter. I spend a great deal of my time checking and re-checking all the functions of my day-to-day tasks. It’s been said God is in the details, and I believe that’s true. In a time of so much rounding, it’s refreshing to be in our industry where everything is important. I just wish the whole world shared my monomaniacal vision of accuracy. From the orders at the restaurants I’ve sent back three times because everyone from the server to the cook could not be burdened with the accuracy of the job at hand, to the automotive mechanic that forgot to torque the drain plug on your oil pan, causing your engine to seize; rounding has become a plague.

I mean, I am absolutely astonished by how it is we have come this far, but still pounder the future if we do not add a bit more care in our daily functions. Every time I hear the Six Sigma term, I can’t help but laugh. Minuscule failure requirements are a joke. Ninety percent of my daily interactions with companies are a fail. Sorry I didn’t mean to get into a rant, but I’m sure you can relate to the new storm of inaccuracy.

But still we must be careful of the other side of the equation. Under our thick regulatory environment it’s easy to bog down to micro details and when we over-shoot the mark on the other side of the equation, we make it impossible for others to interpret our work.

If the bottle says “two pills every four hours,” taking 10 will have a bad outcome, just as taking one would have a bad outcome. Where we need to be is where we need to be, not less, not more. (more…)

Green Packaging Trends

June 6, 2011  |  Package Testing  |  No Comments

by Jennifer Dean
Staff Writer

Much of the medical device industry has been slow to incorporate biodegradable, green materials in their design for several reasons, some of which include cost and regulatory concerns.

But there are eco-friendly packaging options out there and the trend is picking up speed. According to BBC research, the biodegradable plastics market had reached more than 500 million pounds by 2007 and should reach 1.2 billion pounds by 2012.

One bio example currently in use is polylactic acid (PLA), which accounted for nearly 90 percent of bioplastics used in 2008, according to a study from the Freedonia Group. PLA is made from starches such as corn or sugar. And resin manufacturer Cereplast is utilizing hybrid plastic resins made of up to 50 percent green content, such as corn, potatoes and rice.

Another green option for medical packaging suppliers is recycling. Recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) can be used in secondary medical packaging applications.

A few years back, Placon launched an EcoStar PET family of products that are made up of at least 50 percent post-consumer content and 85 percent total recycled content. The products included clamshells, in-process trays and glucose meter packaging.

More recently, big-names Kimberly-Clark, Johnson & Johnson and Waste Management are among a group of companies that have founded a technical coalition to develop recycling and packaging innovations for medical products. Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council also includes DuPont, Cardinal Health, Hospira, Engineered Plastics, and Becton, Dickinson and Company.

The group seeks to increase recycling of healthcare plastics and identify barriers and solutions that exist along the entire product chain, from design and manufacturing to use and disposal. (more…)

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