Medical Devices: What Those Paying Are Saying

Lisa Suennen, a partner at the venture capital firm the Psilos Group, has sat through countless pitches from medical device companies seeking funding. Psilos is a diversified fund focused on health care, and its current $300 million fund invests across health care services, health care IT, and medical devices, with medical devices tending to account for 34% of the mix. Before becoming a founding partner of Psilos in 1998, Suennen had spent 10 years as an executive at Merit Behavioral Care, a specialty health care management organization. Because she operates in both the service and medical device worlds, Suennen says she has realized how insular the thinking of the medical device world is and how out of sync it is with the way health systems operate. “I often see medtech start-ups focused on getting a reimbursement code. But getting a code isn’t the same thing as getting it paid for and too few really understand that.”

Medtech companies are certainly sensitive to the pressures of health care reform and they’re conscious that their products need to...