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01 CHALLENGE Spinal fusion surgery often requires that bone be harvested from the patient, reduced to a small and consistent size, and reintroduced into the patient to promote bone growth. Stryker identified an opportunity to replace this painstaking, manual process with an efficient powered solution. Stryker challenged the design team to develop a best in class bone mill for surgeons and scrub nurses that meet their needs and fit within their existing workflow. The critical technical issues were how to consistently mill the desired sized bone chips while ensuring maximum cell viability and integrating with Stryker’s existing capital equipment products. 02 SOLUTION The effort was broken into two parallel activities. First, potential bone reducing techniques were researched and prototyped with the primary goal of finding a solution that minimized the detrimental effects to the bone’s integrity from the milling process. Second, contextual research was performed to identify key interaction points and develop an optimized workflow before focusing on form. The results of these activities were then brought together to develop the initial product architecture. The design was then prototyped and refined until the final product was suitable for manufacture. 03 IMPACT Bone mills allow surgeons to utilize patient’s bone in fusion surgeries without the need for expensive bone graft substitutes. The patented Stryker Mill efficiently and consistently reduces harvested autologous bone into appropriately sized particles with a single pass cutting action. This means that the milling operation is now performed with much less effort and time by the surgical team while providing consistent sized bone that is viable. Resulting Bone Mill sales were triple Stryker’s original expectations for the first year and shut the door on competitors who were trying to use Stryker’s previous lack of a bone mill product to enter Stryker accounts.