So we're working on a solution to reduce the use of intravenous sedation
which are a high cost and high complication drug in intensive care units.
>> The big stakeholders in this area are the payers.
Certainly insurance companies including Medicare.
And as well the administrators at the hospitals especially because
the predominant population of patients that end up in the intensive care unit,
are in the Medicare population, and
increasingly intensive care is being under reimbursed for that population.
So anything that helps, gets the elderly patient better, faster, from the ICU to
the ward, something the hospital administrators are really going to love.
As well, the pharmacy doesn't like paying for
extremely high cost medications that are being used right now for
these IV sedatives so any reduction in that makes them a positive stakeholder.
>> And certainly the patient is a is a positive stakeholder in this case they
were a they were certainly receiving arguably the most benefit out of
the technology but because of where they fit in the relative power stream.
They don't have a lot of say about how their care is
practiced within the ICU environment.
But at the end of the day, I think the reality is that, of care in that high,
high intensity environment dictates its hospital administrators make
the choices and then the payers decide what gets paid for.
… in terms of understanding how [COUGH] how much value we could you know,
extract from the system in terms of pricing.
But that was a bit of a different kind of nuance.
Because on the one hand, you have all of these downstream complications you're
avoiding that are you know, multi-billion dollar big ticket items every single year.
And you're improving care and you're improving patient comfort.
On the other hand, people are looking at it and their saying this is a,
this is a $2 tube, you're going to ask me to pay what for this?
And so there’s, there's a bit of a balancing act between that pendulum.
so, the kind of middle ground that we found was that by tying our pricing to
the, sedation itself we were able to.
Really focus in on, on value that we could capture without having to
prove out all of those downstream clinical reductions and outcomes.
Because all we had to do over a short period of time,
reduce the amount of sedation by half,
And then that corresponds to a dollar value reduction in sedation price.
You know, sedation itself costs between $400 and
$800 per day, depending on patient size, and, and dosage and etcetera.
So if you can reduce it by half, that's $200 to $400 in savings,
which gives you a hard direct cost number for us to get in on.
On a daily basis that would be saved from using the Wyshbone device and
then we can start to worry about the value provided in the other complications down
stream as we start to do larger clinical studies off the sale of this device.
one of the lessons that we learned from our our market analysis was that if,
you know, despite the fact that we are potentially saving you know,
in the thousands and thousands of dollars for every patient.
There, there is a ceiling to the to the ASP, and understanding what
the the care community is, is used to seeing in terms of pricing for
medical devices understanding exactly what the competition costs to the hospital.
And that's not always an easily answered question because of the,
the complexity of reimbursement.
Those are the kinds of things that, that I think are,
are worth spending, spending a lot of time on to to truly understand.
And to, to understand that that may be the fundamental ceiling to to a price point
and to defining a market opportunity rather than the actual savings.
Although the savings itself is a powerful driver to adoption.
…. in terms of just the,
just briefly on the the intra-hospital dynamics and
dealing with pharmacy budgets and ICU budgets.
We learned that the, the global assessment of the, value to the hospital is
far more important now than the value delivered to individual departments.
And that's a change from probably five to ten years ago where,
individual hospital departments were very concerned about their local budgets.
Where there was very little attention paid to the global budget of the hospital.
And that has completely changed now.
And has changed both our market analysis but
also you know, informed the, the stakeholder analysis as well.
…. the dirty little secret is don't just trust what the internet tells you.
Actually go talk to people, and get them to tell you what they think.
Who actually are in the market, know what things cost, who
know what they're spending, who know why they're choosing one product over another.
That's really where the, the intellectual nuggets of wisdom are as opposed to,
you know, certainly the top down analysis is great from a, from an initial sweep.
But once you get that initial sweep done, you really gotta go talk to people on
the ground to figure out what's, you know, smoke and what's actually real.