At OrthoView, we’ve just celebrated the first anniversary of becoming a Materialise company. For a small company with a defined niche – providing pre-operative planning solutions to orthopedic surgeons – joining a rather large one, it’s been a rollercoaster of a year with great things learned and accomplished on both sides. We’ve been impressed by the enthusiasm and passion of our colleagues at Materialise, and a year later, we’ve learned both to do things differently and to do different things.
OrthoView specializes in pre-operative planning solutions
OrthoView: What exactly do we do?
OrthoView specializes in providing orthopedic surgeons with software solutions for planning and templating their cases with digital x-ray images, i.e., planning in 2D. We provide a vendor-neutral prosthesis template library to give surgeons the ability to choose multiple implant options, while our Smart Templates interact virtually with our planning wizards to make planning easier and quicker. With this specialized niche, we already had an established presence in certain market areas before joining Materialise. Coming to Materialise, we found that the approach and workflow were much more process-driven than we were used to. The wide ambitious mission statement at Materialise – working for a better and healthier world – was interesting and invigorating.
When 2D meets 3D: Complementary solutions
There’s sometimes a misconception that one approach is inherently better than the other, that you don’t need 2D planning if you can do it in 3D. But it’s precisely because OrthoView already had recognized proficiency in 2D pre-operative planning that we are able to help identify when and why a surgeon sometimes needs to make the switch to 3D for a complex case. It’s easy to be excited by the value of supplementing our software with access to 3D technologies. The reality is more nuanced, and the value of 2D for planning standard cases is well-documented.
3D technology, as available with Materialise products and services for the medical sector, enables OrthoView to offer added value and choice to our customers by pointing them to complementary and supplementary solutions, thereby enhancing our existing services and not supplanting them. Joining Materialise has increased both our capability and our reach by providing our customers with access to a wide ranging set of planning and surgical options which can not only assist the orthopedic surgeon on a daily basis but make all the difference to the outcome in complex cases.