Israel's Rambam Hospital Opens an In-House Center for 3D Printed Implants

A hospital that prints its own parts

Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel, has opened a Digital Implant Engineering Center built with two industrial partners. EOS brings metal 3D printing. PTC brings its Creo CAD software. Together they let engineers and physicians design and produce custom implants under one roof, at the point of care.

The center is a clear signal of where hospital manufacturing is heading. Instead of sending a scan to an outside shop and waiting, the hospital keeps the whole chain in house: design, validation, printing, and quality control.

Why point of care matters

Dr. Michal Mekel, Rambam's Director General, framed the center as a new benchmark for personalized medicine in medical devices. Nikolai Zaepernick, chief strategy officer at EOS, pointed to the need to pair industrial grade additive manufacturing with validated hospital workflows, the kind that take a patient scan straight to a printed part.

PTC's vice president of technology, Ronen Ben Horin, described the center as a way to tie clinical need, design, manufacturability, and workflow discipline into a single system. The practical payoff is shorter timelines and one less external supplier between a surgeon and the implant they need.

The scale behind it

Rambam is not a small clinic. It is a 1,100 bed academic hospital serving more than 2.7 million people in northern Israel, and the region's only tertiary medical center. It is also the country's most experienced trauma facility, and it supports the IDF Northern Command, UN peacekeeping forces, and the U.S. Sixth Fleet. Implant use has grown steadily across its pediatric and adult oncology work, which makes on site production a real logistics win.

Part of a wider shift

Rambam is not alone. Hospitals elsewhere are standing up their own additive manufacturing units, from Madrid's dual licensed 3D printing unit to a new NHS funded lab at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. The model is the same: keep the manufacturing close to the patient, and let clinicians drive the design.

For 3D printing, the hospital ward is becoming one more production floor. Rambam's center shows what that looks like when it is done with industrial hardware rather than hobbyist gear.