Medtronic Neurovascular goes remote with Avail Medsystems deal

Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) Neurovascular will pay to use hundreds of Avail Medsystems consoles in operating rooms across the country under a first-of-its-kind deal, leaders of both businesses told MassDevice this week.

The Medtronic unit will use Avail’s operating room telepresence technology to connect virtually with neurosurgeons and other care providers as they treat stroke patients, Medtronic Neurovascular President Dan Volz said in an interview. The deal covers several hundred Avail consoles, he said.

Additionally, the consoles will let surgeons confer with other physicians and experts over the system. Avail’s system offers two-way visual, audio and data communication between an operating room and remote users of the Avail app on a laptop or tablet.

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Medtronic will use the technology primarily for training and education to start, Volz said, but he expects the deal will also play a key role in device innovation. (Read more on that from our sister publication Medical Design & Outsourcing.)

A ‘preferred relationship’ between Medtronic and Avail Medsystems

The three-year agreement is worth tens of millions of dollars for a limited number of monthly hours per console, Avail CEO Daniel Hawkins said in an interview, making it the largest deal yet for the Santa Clara, California–based device maker.

It’s a big boost for Avail’s total console footprint, which Hawkins put at a few hundred placed now and around 1,100 facilities under master service agreements with health systems.

Volz said he has a strategic business plan built on expanding the number of patients treated with Medtronic Neurovascular products. He aims to increase that figure from 250,000 last year to 500,000 by fiscal year 2025. System placement is “the underbelly of that,” he said.

“The most important metric to our business is the number of people that we help treat,” Volz said.

He couldn’t yet say exactly where Medtronic will place the consoles.

“We want a great sampling of the country,” he said. “There are experts all over … and unique patient populations in each of these different geographies that we want to make sure are well represented.”

Medtronic Neurovascular competitors will not have access to Medtronic’s Avail consoles under the deal, which Hawkins characterized as a “preferred relationship.”

“We have term sheets in front of a number of other medical device businesses to do” similar things in other specialties, Hawkins said.

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