About Allomedo
What the Index Is for, How It Is Built, Who Builds It, and What Comes Next.
Why Allomedo Exists
A Reference Work for Buyers Who Go to the Factory
Procurement inside the medical industry has no reference work of its own that is free to read, as finance has in its company registers. A buyer looking for the factory behind a device has marketplaces, which carry no regulatory record, and registries, which name one company at a time. Allomedo was built to be that reference. Its subject is the one fact a manufacturer’s own website can never carry: who else makes the same thing. The index covers 5,100 manufacturers in China and 2,581 device types, and under each device type it lists every Chinese factory registered for it.
Every fact on the site is public: each manufacturer disclosed it in a filing that is open to all. The cross-reference between the filings had never been built where anyone could look it up, and building it is Allomedo’s work.
Allomedo should be the page a buyer opens before a marketplace: every Chinese manufacturer at one address, read from its filings and completed by the manufacturer itself. Price and capacity are in no filing, so the buyer asks the factory for them. The page names the factory.
Who It Is For
The Buyer at the Factory Gate
Allomedo is written for buyers who deal with the factory rather than with the brand: distributors and importers, the people who fit out a hospital or a clinic from nothing, and those who buy for a ministry or an aid organisation. Veterinary, dental and laboratory suppliers, and the hospital furniture trade, already buy from the factory in this way. It also serves a manufacturer looking up its own record.
A reader comes here to look something up, and every page answers two questions. How to work through them for a purchase is on the sourcing page. A device page names the Chinese manufacturers holding a registration for it, and what else each one makes. A manufacturer page names what the plant is registered to make, and what it has catalogued, cleared or had recalled.
Registration Is Not Listing
The Gap This Index Exists to Close
A manufacturer registers its establishment with the United States regulator, naming the device types it is set up to make. The listing is a different filing, one per catalogued product, and it is made by the company whose name is on the box. When the device is made in China, that company is usually the importer.
Allomedo is built from the registrations, which is why it names factories where a listings index names importers. A listing appears on a manufacturer’s page only where the manufacturer filed it in its own name.
Most Chinese factories file no listing, so no catalogue and no search engine leads to them, and the registration is the only public document that names their device types. 1,989 of the 5,100 declare the role of contract manufacturer on that registration.
One Product Code, Measured
Eye Pads, FDA Code HMP
For one product code, eye pads, the two counts are these:
| Registered to make them, worldwide | 170 firms |
|---|---|
| Registered to make them, in China | 100 firms |
| Filing a product listing, worldwide | 20 firms |
| Doing both, in China | 1 |
A listings-only index finds 1 in China. This one finds 100. The same measurement can be made for each of the 2,581 device types China is registered for.
Where the Record Comes From
The Filings, and How They Become Pages
A manufacturer whose devices are sold in the United States registers its establishment there, in its own name, with the Food and Drug Administration. That registration is the source of every page on this site. Clearances and recalls come from the same regulator’s records.
No record on the site is written or edited by hand. Company names are normalised, so that one factory filed under more than one spelling is one page. The registrations are joined to the device catalogue and to the clearance and recall records, and the result is read from the device rather than from the firm. The same rules apply to every page.
Each release of the filings is compared with the one before it and only the differences are applied. A manufacturer’s page therefore keeps its address from one release to the next, and a registration that lapses stays on the record with the date it lapsed, so that a buyer who found a name here can later learn what became of it. The build date is on every record.
A record found wrong is corrected in the record itself, before the next release, through the contact page.
Who Builds It
Noo, With Sentiention
Allomedo is built and run by Noo, the studio of Piotr Zalewski, data architect. Noo builds reference resources from the filings regulators publish, and the design is the data structure: what a record is, how one joins another, and what a page must keep when the source changes. The point is transparency in sourcing. The factory behind a device should be as easy to find as the device itself, and a buyer should not have to be told what a public filing already says.
Sentiention is the partner, a sourcing and venture practice between Europe and Asia, run from Germany and carried out on the ground in China, where it has people of its own and vets a factory before a request for quotation goes to it. Its consumables work, textile, linen, plastics and paper, is the material of some of the most-supplied device types in this index: gowns, drapes, gauze, bedding, tape and disposables.
What Comes Next
Four Things in Preparation, None Open Today
Manufacturers will complete their own record with what the filing does not carry. What that is, and where to write, is on the factory page.
Buyers will be able to ask for a quotation and a consolidated shipment. The seller will be a licensed operator named on the site, and Allomedo will pass the request to it and sell nothing itself. Until that operator is named, no request is passed on.
Europe will become the second source. The European database of medical devices, EUDAMED, has public searches that make a cross-check possible, and a manufacturer corroborated by two regulators is a stronger record. Nothing on the site comes from a European source today. When it does, each fact will say which regulator it came from.
Refresh will run on a schedule, so that a manufacturer’s page gains a history with each release: when the company first appeared and what has changed since. Everything here apart from the manufacturer’s own completion goes through the contact page.