Andrew Heuerman, The Patient Company - Patient Transfer Device | LSI USA '24

Andrew Heuerman  0:03  
My name is Andrew Heuerman, co founder of The Patient Company where we are reimagining the way that patients are moved. We're starting specifically with our product simple for lateral patient transfer, which we just started delivering two weeks ago. So really excited to be here, but also excited to get back to our customers. So many people may know that there's a nursing shortage issue, becoming a crisis if not a crisis already. But what most people don't realize is that there's also an injury issue with these same nurses. So our stance as a company that this is not a coincidence, as nurses are actually the number one most injured job in any industry. In addition to these injuries, we found that patient falls despite process improvement. Staff changes in technology are persisting. And specifically, there's an issue with patient falls related to drops or when patients are dropped while being moved physically by staff. So that's why we developed simple, but I want to talk about what's out there right now for lateral transfer as well. So currently, the standard or the gold standard, everywhere you go is just physically moving patients grabbing as many people as you can point a patient from one surface to another. There are also lifts out there, which are great for many things, but specifically moving patients from one surface to another not very good. Last, there are some assistive technologies, which essentially reduce the friction or reduce the weight required to move these patients. But unfortunately, the issue with all of these other technologies is you actually have to physically move your patient on to them before they can be moved for these purposes, which is really tricky given that both OSHA AMA and other clinical bodies mandate that you can't lift more than 35 pounds at any given time. Seeing that the average patient weight is about 220 pounds, you can't really physically move your patients onto these products to be used without breaking those mandates. So what you have to do is you have to go find a boatload of staff to help you get these patients moved. So we did some time studies, we found it actually takes 22 minutes on average, to move your patients safely by following these mandates. So that is really why we set out to simulate the manual poll with our product simple, I'm just going to show you a quick video of how this works. The first half of setup is meant to be completed by just one user take the drop off of the device and position it next to the patient about hip to shoulder or center of gravity next to the patient. You then wrap whatever surface the patient is lying directly on top of around the draw bar. And on either end, you slip the loop over each end of the draw bar securing it into position to then be connected to the rest of the device. Once you're ready to connect it to the rest of the device, you're going to call in your second caregiver who's going to help by actually getting the device itself into position, moving the bumper into the correct placement against the bed that you're transferring to, you'll then put the brake into the brake position and extend the strap out to your second caregiver. Once the strap and the buckle are in position correctly, you'll then ensure that the patient is secure and against the surface they're transferring to by moving both of the positions to be directly next to each other and putting them both into the brake position. It's recommended during transfer that the second caregiver guide the feet or the head of the patient protecting the patient against any specific scenarios whether they have injuries, lines, etc, that make their patient transfer more unique.

So hopefully everyone feels like they can use the device after that one video should be very easy to use. The whole idea is that attaches to whatever's already underneath your patient, no need to physically move them. Before you do that transfer. It's also to people under two minutes able to slip that video into my nine minute presentation here. So where are we at today? Where are we going? We just got registered with the FDA last year 2023 cents, then we completed the series a really for the production launch of the company as well as to get our gross margin down to 70% through a DFM activity. So that brings us into this year where we just started delivering that's really the big news from this conference. We did also just get listed on the FSS and we're forecasted do about 1.5 to $2 million in revenue in our first year of sales. We wouldn't been able to do this without our research partners, which we're extremely grateful for U of M Corp. Well health and Mayo Clinic while they're finding these research studies is that this is clinically comparable to other products for this patient movement. What's great about that is that as an inherent reduced risk as no staff is required to physically move these patients and there's a high preference for this technology specifically in Radiology Departments. We always hear at night because there's still this issue of throughput despite limited staff in those environments. So during this development, research FDA process we learned a lot and we're really excited to start these sales activities. But we also learned enough to Start development of what we're calling simple Pro, which is additional functions for this lateral transfer system. This includes the ability to turn in prone patients, take them from supine to seated, boost them up in bed and also hold patients in Trendelenburg position during surgery. These, these patient movements have really similar issues to lateral transfer, and are required in a variety of clinical environments. But what we found really interesting during this development period is that for all five of these movements, the four on the screen and lateral transfer, there's no data associated with these patient movements today at all. So during development, we worked with some of our clinical staff members just to basically take what our fleet or excuse me what our device is measuring today, and build that into a dashboard that's useful for understanding how when why patients should be moved and where this is now building into what would be described as a fleet management dashboard of when you have multiple devices doing all of these different activities, to have insights of when these are done, who's doing them how successful they were. And other things like patient weight, I'm showing specifically here, you could click in and see not only where how much these patients weigh, but where they're being moved. This is really exciting for us as we move into the next phase of our business, as it allows us to move from really a capital equipment sale into more of a paper transfer or a subscription model. So I'm sure everyone's excited about these slides at this point in the conference. But really, what I want to show here is that our growth trajectory is just to get to about 1% of our total addressable market. We're doing that with the support of our research partners. I mentioned Mayo Clinic core wall health, we also have a great partner and in the federal government, as well as some GPOs that we're working on right now. We're introducing those new product functions with the release of simple pro next year. And then we'll be looking to scale with strategic partners as well as through international expansion to some already interested customers and partners. We have a really small launch team. We're currently three people full time with a bunch of contractors. So I'm really proud of what we've done. But I think it would be naive to think that we could get much further without the support from people like those who are here today. So I want to point out Teresa, former chief nursing officer of Mayo Clinic, Phoenix is really our clinical leader. Linda has a fantastic background in manufacturing, product development, they've been critical to this point. And then we have some really good sales and marketing support between Terry Harris and Andy Teague. And building that Customer Success program, as I'm sure you guys can understand training is so critical in this environment. So really, what I'm here for today is not to seek investment as we just closed that round, but really to seek partners. We know that we need help getting this product out there getting it sold, getting this further development done. Obviously the simple pro functions are great, they're working well. But we want research partners and we want teammates as well to come join this this team and reimagine how patients are moved. If you have any questions, please let me know I'd be happy to jump off stage and talk to you about really where this company is going though their functions and how they're working today as well as the research and more detail. Thanks for the time