Pronk Technologies’ mission is to serve the healthcare technology management (HTM) community by providing innovative products to refine and streamline the biomedical maintenance and support process. Biomedical engineers in the field need equipment that is portable, affordable, rugged, reliable, and easy to use. Pronk designs and manufactures specialized diagnostic tools that are tailored for this environment.
Pronk was founded in 2004 by Karl Ruiter, who attended a California Medical Instrumentation Association (CMIA) meeting to learn about innovations in medical devices that would yield the most benefit for the healthcare sector. The attendees strongly expressed the desire for affordable and portable test equipment designed for their specific needs.
“Attending this meeting redefined our direction as a company to provide test equipment solutions that are the most portable, rugged and easy to use,” Pronk Technologies Vice President of Sales and Marketing Greg Alkire says.
“From the very beginning our focus has been on designing palm-sized test equipment at an affordable price to bring accuracy, speed and portability for biomedical engineers with the goal of each having their own complete set of test equipment,” he adds. “This provides great flexibility in always having their essential tools available and ready to go. Our BMET PACK PRO with all the Pronk products and standard accessories achieves this aim. We have also recently developed the Pronk Mobilize option for wireless control and data capture of all test results that brings an even higher level of accuracy plus dramatic gains in speed for biomeds in completing PMs.”
Pronk’s desire and ability to connect with HTM professionals is one reason behind the company’s success and continued growth.
“Our success is very much centered on staying connected to the HTM community. We include the HTM community in our design concepts and pre-production product evaluations. We rely on their thoughtful feedback and make design changes they recommend. This has been very critical to our development of new products,” Alkire explains.
“We really appreciate their goodwill and experience, and we make every effort to support every HTM biomedical association and actively participate in their meetings and symposiums nationwide.”
Pronk’s strong relationship with the HTM community continues to result in innovations and new products, including its Mobilize wireless solution.
“We are excited to expand the capabilities of our portable test equipment products with our new Mobilize wireless solution. This is a breakthrough not only in control and data capture mechanisms, but also in taking the headache out of test procedures,” Alkire says. “Biomedical engineers can now perform service on a medical device while having their procedures on their smart devices that communicate wirelessly to the test equipment. For example, let’s say an electrical safety test sequence is required as part of a test procedure. The biomed using the Mobilize App gets to that step on the procedure and simply presses ‘run’ on the app, which then wirelessly transmits the sequence to the electrical safety analyzer and starts it.
“In this way, our Mobilize procedures are tailored to what the customers’ procedures require and will wirelessly instruct the test equipment to perform the necessary steps.
“All the test results are captured in the app for a complete, detailed test report. Mobilize also integrates to a CMMS, eliminating the need to manually document the service report information.
“We are continuously innovating in all aspects of our business, including product designs, software solutions and customer service,” he adds. “Our design team includes not only the R&D team, but also customers throughout the nation who generously offer their feedback. In addition, medical device manufacturers contribute toward ensuring that our designs will meet their testing requirements. Having these partners involved early in the research process enables us to sharpen the design and features to ensure they will meet the needs of the market. Having high-quality standards are also very critical to our designs. One of the key design factors is our durability design standard, which requires all products to be field-rugged and operational after drop testing them 50 times from three feet without having any failures. Each product must pass all of these quality standards before we will place it on the market.”
Success often includes overcoming challenges. Pronk is not immune to obstacles and like many companies was forced to deal with supply chain issues amid the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).
“Supply chain shortages impacted our industry as a whole. We dealt with this very aggressively, and our manufacturing team worked tirelessly, sourcing all the critical parts needed,” Alkire explains. “This included increasing our own inventory levels to eliminate risks, accommodating new suppliers and parts, and solidifying supplier agreements for better management of parts lead times. All of these efforts paid off, and we were able to maintain our customer commitments on all product orders with zero interruptions.”
Alkire shared an example of the Pronk mindset when it comes to overcoming obstacles to serve its customers.
“We recently received a large, urgent order for our FlowTrax Multi-function Infusion Pump Analyzer where the customer needed delivery in the most expedited way possible. In order to ensure we met the customer’s needs, we urgently opened multiple shifts in our manufacturing facility, including a third shift. We pride ourselves in consistently rising to the occasion to complete whatever is necessary to meet our customers’ needs,” he says.
“We have a great team at Pronk, and all of our employees are very critical to our success,” Alkire adds. “One of them is our software design engineer, Van Malan, who specializes in the software development of new products and customer software solutions. He received his engineering degree from the University of California. During his career, Van has been awarded several patents for utilizing embedded computers analyzing real world collected data. Van also enjoys amateur ham radio and has an extra class license. He works digital modes to communicate around the world and in local emergency exercises. His passion is to keep inventing new products that produce large utility in a small package.”
For more information, visit pronktech.com.
