From Happy Valley to the Front Lines of American Healthcare

Photo: Drucker Diagnostics

Any one of us could be using Drucker Diagnostics products as part of our healthcare and not even know that we’re satisfied beneficiaries of a leading Happy Valley business.

Drucker Diagnostics is a leading American manufacturing company and the world’s largest provider of clinical centrifuges. Through strong customer service, Drucker Diagnostics serves critical healthcare industries, including physician’s offices, reference laboratories, hospital labs, blood banks and the military. With over 150 enterprise and organizational partners globally, Drucker Diagnostics’ blood separation technology is solving challenges across the nation and the globe. But as a recent interview with Drucker Diagnostics CEO Craig Stout unveils, the company’s ambitions aren’t even limited to Earth’s atmosphere.

Choosing a Partner: Drucker Diagnostics Makes the Move from Florida to Happy Valley

As the leading producer of pre-analytic clinical laboratory equipment in the United States, Drucker Diagnostics offers a broad variety of sophisticated clinical equipment. However, the company’s main product is clinical centrifuges – the type used in medical laboratory work. The company now manufactures more than 40,000 clinical centrifuges each year. As these centrifuges are distributed around the globe, they’re used in laboratory and healthcare applications that help make people safer, healthier and more productive.

Beyond its work in medical technology engineering, though, Drucker Diagnostics is a design and manufacturing company specializing in injection molding advanced composite materials and CNC machining. As a company that designs, builds and distributes products from the heart of Pennsylvania, Drucker Diagnostics is harnessing advanced technologies to make American manufacturing stronger — in fact, Drucker was drawn to Happy Valley due to the strong intellectual resources available in the community.

From its sole location in Happy Valley, Drucker has been able to capture an impressive 90% of the market share for key equipment suppliers in physicians’ offices and clinic labs, and its presence in the hospital labs is growing.

Drucker Diagnostics was in operation for years in South Florida. It relocated to State College in 1996, and the draw was Penn State. According to Stout, “We needed research partners to help with analyzing blood collection tubes, and we chose Penn State as a partner. Through a Ben Franklin grant, the business was able to relocate to Penn State.” As fate would have it, Stout was an engineering student at Penn State at this time, and he started as an intern shortly after Drucker relocated to the area.

Since, Drucker Diagnostics has grown and adapted with the changing advances in technology. The organization is adept at using complex manufacturing technologies and has created more efficient and thorough ways to meet the needs of clients, and the organization has expanded to employ Pennsylvanian workers across a variety of specialized fields.

Over the years, as Stout explains, “We grew from a small business with just a handful of employees and a few patents. Today, we have over 100 employees and are continuing to hire from the local area.”

On the Front Lines of American Healthcare

Now that COVID has been in the news every day, people are becoming increasingly aware of the critical importance medical laboratories serve in our lives. Drucker has been working closely with physician and clinical labs, including the top names in the field. From its sole location in Happy Valley, Drucker has been able to capture an impressive 90% of the market share for key equipment suppliers in physicians’ offices and clinic labs, and its presence in the hospital labs is growing. In other words, if you’re having blood drawn, that blood sample is almost always being processed in Drucker products.

A New Frontier in Healthcare Technology

The Drucker technology team consists of capable engineers, craftsmen and technicians who work tirelessly to design and create customized solutions for each and every client. They function as a vertically integrated manufacturer with in-house design, injection molding, CNC machining, printing, metal bending and forming and instrument assembly. Altogether, this highly skilled and capable team manufactures millions of components annually for use economy-wide; however, Drucker’s ambitions don’t stop there.

Just a few years ago, Drucker Diagnostics worked with NASA to design, manufacture and launch a blood processing centrifuge system that was controllable from ground base in Houston. Astronauts are now regularly able to draw blood, test it for impacts in a zero-gravity environment and derive critical insights from the research.

“This is in use today aboard the International Space Station,” Stout explains proudly, before adding: “Now, we hold the record for the most expensive blood centrifuge system ever created! And, as you could imagine, this was a fun and exciting project for the Drucker team — all this was designed and built in [Happy Valley].”

As Stout explains, “We do our own design, injection molding, machining, sheet metal work, everything required… in our local facility.”

Drucker Diagnostics is the Solution

A Happy Valley company, Drucker Diagnostics has the ability, knowledge and capacity to cater to the needs of its partners and clients worldwide. Drucker Diagnostics serves some of the fastest-growing companies in the United States as a leading vendor in the healthcare industry, producing privately-labeled products for more than 150 corporate partners and distributing products to a global customer base across over 80 countries. In addition, Drucker delivers over 10 million components to the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) market annually.

As a result, any one of us could be using Drucker Diagnostics products as part of our healthcare and not even know that we’re satisfied customers of a leading Happy Valley business.