Area medical firm goes high-tech

COURTESY PHOTO Fort Myers-based Innovative Medical's new manufacturing clean room is a state-of-theart system that treats metal to protect it from corrosion. Innovative manufactures medical implants and instrumentation.

Innovative Medical, a medical manufacturing company, has unveiled a new clean room system, announced company president, Paul McCullers.

The 12-station system is fully-automated, with each step in the process documented by a computer, guaranteeing a level of quality that cannot be ensured by other manufacturing plants that passivate by hand. Passivation is the immersion of an object in a solution of nitric acid, or of nitric acid plus oxidizing salts, which restores the original corrosion resistant surface by forming a thin transparent oxide film. The treatment also dissolves any embedded or smeared materials picked up on the surface during processing.

"The system at Innovative Medical is very advanced in comparison to manually operated passivation systems," said McCullers. "Ours operates on a conveyor and is controlled by a computer system that tracks quality assurance at each step along the way."

Innovative Medical operates in a manufacturing plant located off Treeline Boulevard with a staff of highly skilled manufacturing engineers. Innovative utilizes cutting-edge manufacturing technologies to meet the production requirements for several companies that are supplying the world with implants - spine, trauma, orthopedic, sports medicine - as well as instrumentation.