2026 Forecast: Medical Manufacturing Industry Outlook
Medical manufacturers remain cautiously optimistic about the future of the industry. The U.S. leads the market in medical device production, boosted partly by the rapid shift toward a home healthcare model. Other factors include growing adoption of advanced medical technologies for critical disease diagnosis and treatment procedures, along with increasing prevalence of chronic conditions and increasing healthcare expenses.
In Today’s Medical Developments magazine, Mike Johnson, Director of Sales at our Western Pennsylvania facility, offers his insight into the medical industry outlook for 2026.
From a vacuum heat treater’s standpoint, the medical industry outlook for 2026 is extremely promising. All six Solar Atmospheres locations are seeing strong growth in heat treating demand for medical raw materials and components. To support this momentum, we’re expanding with a new facility in Connecticut – strategically located to better serve our growing customer base and strengthen our support for the aerospace, medical, and commercial manufacturing sectors across New England.
As customers accelerate their use of automation, lights-out manufacturing, and robotics, the need for fast, reliable vacuum furnace processing has increased significantly. This rising demand has created ongoing scheduling challenges throughout 2025. In response, we’re assigning dedicated personnel to oversee medical workloads, adding new vacuum furnaces and clean room capacity, and encouraging customers to qualify alternate Solar Atmospheres locations when possible to improve turnaround times.
The alloys driving most of our heat treat activity in 2025 include titanium, PH grades such as 17-7, 15-5, and 17-4, as well as 300- and 400-series stainless steels. With these sensitive materials, we’ve seen prime OEMs refine their vacuum thermal cycles, prompting close collaboration with our furnace manufacturing division to ensure full compliance while keeping processing costs efficient.
After customers worked through excess inventories in 2023 and 2024 – largely the result of lingering COVID-era supply chain disruptions – 2025 finally marked a return to stability and strong, sustained growth for the industry.
Read the full 2026 Medical Manufacturing Industry Forecast at Today’s Medical Development