Group hopes to beef up medical manufacturing

MANKATO — In North Mankato, Coloplast makes a variety of products for people with intimate health care needs, including ostomy, continence, urology, wound and skin care products.

Across the river in Mankato, Bemis crafts flexible and rigid plastic packaging for medical and pharmaceutical companies.

While the two are among the larger and better known firms in the medical manufacturing industry, there are at least 64 others in the nine-county region that directly or indirectly support medical manufacturing.

A new effort, called MedTech Connect, officially launched Wednesday, aims to expand medical manufacturing in south-central Minnesota.

"We came up with recommendation on how to strengthen the industry as we are so close to the medical manufacturing hub in the Twin Cities and to Rochester," said Kristian Braekkan, senior regional planner at Region Nine Development Commission.

With funding from the federal Economic Development Administration, Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation and Region Nine, Braekkan's group studied what is already being done and made recommendations that could expand the industry.

Senior leaders from Boston Scientific, which has manufacturing facilities in the Twin Cities, gave the keynote speech at the kickoff event.

"They were part of the study and gave us guidance on how the industry works," Braekkan said.

He said one of the goals is to better connect medical manufacturers and supporting businesses like transportation, to education institutions and medical users such as hospitals to help make the medical industry more robust in the region.

Some of the recommendations from the study include:

• Larger medical manufacturers must have direct transportation routes and redundant broadband infrastructure. While the area has good transportation routes the report said "broadband infrastructure would have to improve significantly to attract any major (medical) producers."

• Investments are needed in technical training and talent retention. "Electricians, machine operators, welders, and engineers are in high demand but the supply is limited, which hinders expansion for many of the firms interviewed for this study."

• More workforce housing is needed. "Although the region enjoys relatively modest housing and living costs compared to the Twin Cities, many of the communities within the region would need significant investments in workforce housing if larger plants opened up," the report said.

More on MedTech Connect can be found at: rndc.org/what-we-do/medtech-connect/