PhoenixAmerica news release:
Indiana manufacturing company develops emergency ventilator for 5% the cost of current FDA approved devices.
(April 16, 2020) – Phoenix America is a Fort Wayne based engineering and manufacturing company producing motion control device including encoders, speed and position sensors. They were recently contacted to supply some parts for an emergency use ventilator. After fully understanding the demands of the application and the national and worldwide need, the Phoenix America team determined they had the ability to play a larger role. They are now introducing their own emergency use ventilator, the PhoenixAir.
“Our engineering talent along with several NE Indiana customers and suppliers of ours has all the skills and capacity to produce these emergency use ventilators. We believe we can scale this up very quickly and produce the PhoenixAir for 5% of the cost of a traditional, full featured ventilator,” says Vice Preside of Sales and Operations, Scott Mentzer.
Phoenix America has reached our to several local medical professionals for guidance, including Intervention Radiologist, Dr. Fred Vandeman. Dr. Vandeman said not only can the device help patients when a traditional ventilator is not available it can potentially reduce some of the personnel burden on a hospital in a crisis setting.
“A normal ventilator is not managed by the nurse on the floor, it’s managed by the respiratory therapist and they can be overwhelmed by the volume of the patients that need their care and this device can be managed more easily by a nurse than a regular ventilator,” Vandeman said.This device is not meant to a direct substitute for a ventilator but a stopgap when the situation calls for it.
The PhoenixAir would be targeted at patients that from a physicians standpoint don’t need to be on a full blown ventilator and only if they don’t have enough ventilators to service all of their patients.
“This crisis will provide the world some valuable lessons,” explained Mentzer, “perhaps on them can be that devices like the PhoenixAir, while not ideal in every respect, can be stockpiled safey and cost effectively and pulled out only when the situations demand it.”
The next step for the PhoenixAir is perhaps the hardest step. “Concepts like these will be popping up soon in other parts of the world, including Europe,” predicted Mentzer. They only thing that stands in the way for manufacturers such as Phoenix America and our Indiana partners is our federal agencies such as the FDA. We are just now learning how difficult that effort is. Our organization is blessed with talented engineers and skilled assembly workers, not lawyers and lobbyists.”