[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone, this is Tom Sloman with Device Talks.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Device Talks weekly podcast. So excited to have you here today.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: We have an excellent episode.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: A little later in the podcast I will share the interview I did with Dr. Nadine Hashash Haram. She is the CEO and founder of Proximi. Proximi is one of those cool companies that became well known during COVID was founded a couple of years before, but it's really built an impressive sort of infrastructure, digital infrastructure, into the or, not only allowing for remote communications, but also for a lot of really critical tracking of information going on during the procedure. Dr. Hashasharam is a surgeon herself, so she brings a lot of frontline knowledge to what's needed and what's not, and she shares all of that in this conversation. Before then, we'll be joined by John Norris of hsbc. He's industry famous for his presentations on fundraising data and he gives us the lowdown on the Q1 MedTech VC data. And there's some good stuff in there, there's some bad stuff in there. John will cover it all. And Data is a Q1. Data is or quarterly. Data is a great snapshot of what has happened. Sometimes it's a predictor of what can be. And I asked John for his prediction of what Q2 will look like. So some practical insights in there from someone who's very busy tracking venture capital in Medtech. Before we let you go, I wanted to remind you that Device Talks Minnesota. We're very excited to be back in Minnesota. Device Talks Minnesota is happening on June 11th. We just closed the early bird rate, but because you're our loyal podcast listener, I managed to crank up a code for you. DTM Early. That's DTM Early. That'll get you the early bird rate until midnight Eastern on Tuesday. So you have the weekend to save yourself 300 bucks to register and be part of a great Device Talks event. Really excited again to be back in the Twin Cities and really want you to be there. Check out the
[email protected] of course, we'd love to see you at Device Talks Boston as well. Please join us there. If you use the code DTWeekly25 in device talks Boston, you can save yourself a little less than what the Minnesota folks are getting, but you'll do just fine and you'll have a great time joining us on April 30th and May 1st at the BCEC. So go to boston.devicetalks.com to register for that. Go to minnesota.devicetalks.com to register for Device Talks Minnesota. Or you can just go to devicetalks.com and you can find all the event websites there. Finally, next week we are starting our Surgical Robotics Virtual Week. So we'll have presentations from some of the cooler surgical robotics companies out there, including Lupin, Dental, SS Innovations, xcath will be there, and Endoquest as well. So we've got different robotic companies representing different robotic approaches. And you can watch live as I ask questions, you can ask questions of your own and get the insights you need. And it's all free. So go to deviceox.com to register for that. We've got many, many great sponsors for that, so make sure you check that out and thank all of our sponsors as well. So that is a lot going on. We've got a great episode coming your way, so let us get this podcast started.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: All right, you ready for this read?
Well, John Norris of hsbc, welcome to the podcast.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: Thanks, Tom. I always enjoy chatting with you.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: It's always great to have you here. And Chris Newmarker is away, so you are officially our newsmaker of the week. And we have some news in the quarterly 1 numbers for venture investing in Medtech. And we'll talk more broadly as well. But looking at these numbers, we'll get into them in a moment. I just have to wonder, John, are like medtech investors, stress investors, because when things get crazy like Covid and stuff, they just pour money into companies. I thought there'd be a dip in funding given all the uncertainty, but there's not.
[00:04:29] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I think in my opinion, and I've said this many times, yeah. The med Device investors are kind of the steady eddy.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: Players in the healthcare ecosystem. You know, biotech, you get wide changes one way or the other. Health tech, obviously you saw that huge, you know, influx of dollars in 2021, et cetera. But device tends to be pretty stable and I think that there's a lot of good things there because it doesn't allow valuations and an investment to get too frothy. And then on the other side, when you're in a tougher times, there's just, there's more resilience there.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:10] Speaker C: Because these folks know how to get through, you know, multiple downside scenarios. They've done it before and they'll do it again.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: Right. Not our first rodeo. And I'm sure people will point out like, well, these deals are closing. Q1, we're probably started, you know, mid last year and they took time to close and Yada, yada, yada, but no one's pulling out of deals. And let's just get into the numbers. I think what we see in Q2, Q3 may be more representative of how folks are feeling about changing the fda, but what cross those bridges when we come to them. So overall, how would you assess the performance of Q1 and how does it fit into the state of medtech venture capital more broadly?
[00:05:48] Speaker C: Yeah, and I think if I just back up for just a second and you think about 2023 was the year of investors having to take a look at their portfolio, see what was funded, valuations were in flux, no IPOs, it was a really tough year. So there wasn't a lot of new investment that year that like portfolio triage year 2024, all right, starting to get back into the market, do some new deals. But there was caution there because people were continuing to be afraid of what's going on in the overall financing market. If they do a Series A, who's going to do the Series B. There's some caution there, but we did see like a 30% jump in investment in 2024. And when you think about it on a quarterly number basis, I won't throw a lot of numbers out there, but you know, around $2 billion a quarter for dollars to be invested into venture backed medtech companies in the US and Europe. That's a good, that's a good number. It's a good pace. That was our pace for 2024. And if you look at Q1 of 2025, it was at 2.6 billion, so above that $2 billion threshold and actually was the biggest quarter in the last three years. I think you have to go all the way Back to around Q1 of 2022 to find investment at that dollar amount, which is great to see. And not only were dollars up, but deals were up about 20% too, if you look at what the average number of deals there were per quarter last year. So that's great to see. So, you know, more deals getting funded, more dollars pouring into the ecosystem. That's good.
But when you start to peel back the onion a little bit, let's peel.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: Let'S slice it, you start to see the tears come out. There may not be tears. There may not be tears.
[00:07:39] Speaker C: Yeah, maybe there's some tears, but there's some good stuff too, I think. You peel back the onion and you see, okay, one of the things that I saw last year was a lot of these big deals were taking the majority of the dollars that were being invested in the companies. And I think you're seeing that stay the same in Q1 where if you look at about the top 10% of deals and there were like 103, 33 deals. So the top 13, 14 deals took about 50% of all the, all the med device dollars. So you know, these big deals do take a lot of the dollars. Although the biggest deal size was 140 million for a deal. So it wasn't like you're seeing like in Biopharma you saw a $600 million round right at the end of the first quarter. You're not seeing that type of size. But there were 16 deals in the first quarter that were at least $50 million or bigger. And so those are, those are big deals, right?
[00:08:36] Speaker A: I can't believe I'm taking 140 million. Yeah, that's a good size. That's a good size. Before it used to be like, it's not too big. Game change now.
$140 million.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: Yeah, but 16 $50 million deals is good. I mean, I think that shows that there's a lot of activity out in the market. And the question is what kind of companies are getting these $50 million deals? And that's where you start to peel back the onion. And obviously you referred to what's going on in the fd.
Nervous. And the thing is, all these companies are cash burning for the most part, right. In the venture backed ecosystem. And a lot of them are dealing with regulatory milestones that are value inflection points. But there are also other companies that are out in the commercialization phase trying to ramp. And so when you look at these $50 million plus deals, what are they going to? Well, if you go back to 2024, eight of the top 10 deals were funding commercialization plays. These are companies that were 510k cleared already in revenue and then ramping revenue. But in 2025, in Q1 of those 16 deals, eight of them were funding commercialization stage. So six of them were 510, two of them were PMA commercial stage companies that were already in revenue. But the other eight were early stage in clinical development. Six of them were funding PMA pivotal trials and then two of them were funding even earlier on the PMA side, the development side, feasibility trials. So even though we see this hesitancy to fund earlier stage deals, when you get to pivotal trial on the PMA side, you're seeing folks that are ready to jump in and write bigger checks. And of those companies that we're raising for PMA pivotal trials Most of those companies had a new traditional venture investor coming in to help lead those deals. And so that kind of gets back to the question of what's going on with the venture capital folks. You know, when you see the opportunity to get into a pivotal trial funding, you're a little bit closer to exit than you would if you did a Series A.
And, and you might be sacrificing an overall multiple on your, on your investment in terms of getting in later and dealing with the valuation inflection point that's maybe a little bit higher than you would have at a Series A, but, but you're winnowing the time to exit. And I think that's really where, when you're in a cautious market like we are, the traditional venture folks tend to want to look at later stage deals and close that gap to exit and in a sense take some of the technology risk off the table.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Absolutely. No, I mean, we're seeing a lot of the smart money move into that space. It's like seeing fish swim to cooler waters when, you know, when it gets hot in the summertime. They know where to find where the comfortable zone is and they know where to where the opportunities are.
[00:11:32] Speaker C: So, but that doesn't mean it changes whole scale, right? That doesn't mean that the venture landscape as, as we know it has changed permanently. But it's cyclical. It really is.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: So if you, if I'm an early stage CEO raising a series A right now and ask you, John, John, what's the market like? Your answer is difficult.
[00:11:54] Speaker C: It's really difficult. That's not an answer that changes like ever for Med Device, but it is even more difficult than usual in this cycle because you have, not only do you have the traditional venture investors that are being attracted to these late stage PMA pivotal trial fundings, they themselves are ratcheting back their deal investments per year because they don't want to get forced to have to raise their next venture fund without the distributions to really show their investors the LPs that they've been able to get things over the goal line. And so because of that obviously IPO market is, you see a couple companies have gone out, but that's a hard market. You know, M and A has been okay, but you really have to she distributions for these venture funds to get back out to the market and raise their next fund. So they're slow playing, they're slow playing their investments. And if you look at it like what's going to get you to thread that needle to find the venture fund that's going to do their two to four, maybe five investments for the year. Are they going to do early or late? If they're going to do early, what indication, what stage are they looking at? It's tough, you're threading the needle, but you are finding that activity actually is still happening on the early stage side. And in fact, if you think about early stage, Q1 was around 25 deals for about 290 million. And if you think about where things were last year, the second half of last year for early stage sort of seed series A financing was like 150, $160 million a quarter, which was terrible. And I'm like, oh, this is, this is really bad. So seeing almost 300 million in the first quarter, that feels pretty good. There were no deals over 50 million. So you know, you're seeing a bunch of deal, four deals that were over 25 deals that were between 10 and 20 million. So you are seeing some of these folks investing in, you know, into these deals, but you're not seeing a lot of name brand investors getting in. And if I look at those deals, the name brand investors that I saw during that period of time in Q1 was orbimed did a deal, Mayo Clinic did a deal, shangbei did a deal, Catalyst Health did a deal, Andreessen Horowitz even did a deal.
But none other. I didn't really see a lot of other folks that I look at and say, okay, these are major sort of med device players I've seen over time that are early stage investors. So you're not seeing as much activity from these folks. They're really slow playing it. But to see 25 deals raising 300 million feels pretty good. And I think the other thing that I thought was super interesting, last year there was basically just one seed series A cardiovascular deal that happened for the whole year in the US and Europe.
People were really afraid of getting in early stage on cardiovascular or maybe it was just timing, but not much activity at all. In the first quarter. In 25, there were four deals raising a $60 million total.
So that's really good to see because when you think about it, what indication has the most M and A exits in the private M and A exit market? It's cardiovascular. Cardiovascular has always been the leader and it had the most last year as well. So the fact that we weren't seeing a lot of early stage investment in cardiovascular was a little concerning. So nice to see that come back.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: And I see three of the four are ous. Is that surprising?
[00:15:26] Speaker C: Yeah. Which is interesting and that's going to be an interesting theme to look at over this year with all the things that are happening in the market, you know, the choice of doing things in the US versus outside the US and you know, most of these investors, you know, definitely have a reach into Europe, even if you're a US institutional investor. So you wonder where these companies are going to be started and what, what pathway trajectory is going to be the most beneficial for these companies. You know, we'll have to see because I think there's so much that's still to be determined with all the changes that you're, that you're seeing, you know, on the regulatory side.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: And what's another indication that's seen some attention on the early stage side?
[00:16:15] Speaker C: You know, Neuro continues to be pretty, pretty hot. You know, I think I saw your LinkedIn post on the brain computer interface, like highlighting some of those deals. I think. Yeah, so we're definitely seeing some of those as well. I do think non invasive monitoring continues to be a hotter area.
The regulatory landscape is not too aggressive and you can leverage sensor based technology with SaaS software as a service and when you get into those systems and you have that type of payment source, that can be a really nice recurring revenue type of product for these companies. So I think NIM non invasive monitoring is still an area that continues to attract a lot of attention over the last year and a half or so.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: I think people looking at these numbers and you won't be putting out a report on this, these will be reflected in your Q1 sorry, first half report, that'll come out in July. But if you kind of look at it holistically, I mean if you're an early stage person, you know, you're going to have a tough road anyway.
I see established VCs keeping those later stage PMA companies alive and moving forward is a good sign for the industry. I mean, I think it's worse when we're shutting companies down as opposed to when we're not starting new companies. So I don't know. This looks like a healthy ecosystem to me. How do you feel about it?
[00:17:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think it is a healthy ecosystem. But I will say you have to temper that with the rubber hitting the road on a lot of companies, all the way on tech and healthcare. But on the device side, these are companies that raise Insider rounds in 20, 23, maybe raise another Insider round extension in 24 and really have to hit a value inflection point or consider the next steps, which is typically not Good, which is an asset sale or consolidation, et cetera. And I think the issue is when you're having investors that are so cautious in the market and doing so few investment investments, it's really hard to meet that threshold of what a new investor expects.
It's almost always. The answer is almost always more, show me more. Move that goalpost. You've done everything you did as a company in terms of hitting the development stages that you thought were value inflection points and then maybe those aren't. So I think there's going to be a little bit of pain to come with companies. You're seeing it on the biotech side being announced quite a bit. I think device just has fewer companies and maybe not as much press heavy, but those are happening as well. And so it's a tough time. It's a balance. You're seeing venture firms come back to start doing new deals. But that doesn't mean that there's not pain to happen with some of their older portfolio companies who just can't find an outside lead. So it's tempered, which is maybe that's why we keep that theme of steady eddy. There's some good, but you know, there's some bad as well.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: All right, well, we both wanted to keep this to about 15 minutes or so. And knowing that three months is a very short amount of time in medtech. So you're getting a very small snapshot of where we are. But just last question. If you were to bet some money on Q2, would you bet on a good year, a good quarter, a weak quarter, what's your guts say?
[00:19:43] Speaker C: My gut says closer to sort of the averages that we saw in 2024, so slightly down from what we saw in Q1, just because uncertainty breeds cautiousness. And I think if you start to hear things about interactions with the regulatory agencies that are not happening in a timely way, all these companies are all cash burning companies and you know, and most of the value inflection points are predicated upon some sort of interaction or data from, you know, regulatory agencies or clinical trials. And I think if you start to see, you know, timing get pushed out, it just gets people a little bit more nervous. So I don't think that means that, you know, investing is going to stop. I just, I just, it would be surprising for me to see a Q2 that would be similar to the 2.6 billion that we saw in Q1. More around 2 billion or so is probably more likely.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: I think these delays will be baked into the recipe. I just talked with the CEO today who said that they sent an email to the FDA this a couple of weeks ago and it took three. After three weeks they didn't get a reply. So they followed up and then they finally did get a reply. But if there's a lot of stories like that, you're right. Every day that goes by without a reply is X thousands of dollars that's been burned because of expenses. So we'll see.
[00:21:08] Speaker C: Yep. But M and A continues to happen. We continue to see deals get done and you know, and you know the big acquirers need innovation and that has never quieted. It's just the fact that there's not as many acquirers as there are in biotech just means that they can wait for these companies to develop and takes them a little bit longer to get to that stage.
But we saw pretty good M and A last year. I think we're going to, it'll be, I think it'll be just as good this year.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: All right, well it's great to get this little snapshot of where we are in time with Medtech investing. I know as I said earlier, we're not going to, you're not going to put out a full report on this but folks can find you on LinkedIn and just, we should tell them a little bit about hsbc. I mean you've been covering the industry for a long time. Everyone knows you, everyone knows your reports. What has HSBC been up to in Medtech?
[00:22:01] Speaker C: Yeah. Thanks. We're coming up on the two year anniversary of us starting the HSBC Innovation Banking division, brand new division and as I've said in the past, we are a commercial bank that's just looking to work with early stage and venture backed companies up through public that are cash burning. And it's like, yeah, you're sure you need a bank account but how we think about it is we really want to be a partner. We want to be able to talk to you about what's going on in valuations and step ups and active investors and M and A and what's going on in the IPO market and really to be a partner. But it's been great. You know, we went from, you know, you know, zero clients two years ago to being, you know, up and running in the US with a really good influx of clients and you know, over 800 accounts at this point and you know, really good growth and a lot of that is also through doing some of the venture debt stuff we do as well. So we're feeling good. But I just, you know, I would say people think about us as a resource. You know, I'm always happy to engage and chat about what we're seeing in the market and, you know, hopefully we can be, we can be helpful. So thanks, thanks for the opportunity to talk about that, Tom.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Appreciate it, of course. And I'm always again, grateful to have you provide those insights here. John, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: Sounds good. Thank you.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: Well, Dr. Nadine Hashash Hadram, welcome back to the Device Talks weekly podcast.
[00:23:26] Speaker D: It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. It's been a while. I'm glad you're here.
[00:23:29] Speaker A: It has been a while. Yeah, no, it has been a while. We're celebrating our fifth anniversary, actually, as I'm talking to you, I think it was yesterday I posted the first episode and congratulations.
[00:23:39] Speaker D: It's been great to see your progress as well and to follow that industry kind of thought leadership has been really great. So thanks.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: I appreciate that. Thank you. I was not fishing for that, but I will accept it gratefully and be warmed by it for several hours.
But you and I spoke, it was actually April of 2021, so we were still in the middle of it. The vaccine was coming, if I remember my timeline correctly, and we were still in a tunnel and we may be seeing some light, but we were all convinced the world was different than it was going to be. And we're going to emerge from it better connected, doing operations differently, selling medical devices differently. And I'm kind of curious to see if we've realized that. I'm not sure that we have. I've seen a few and I'm hopping right into our thesis right now. And I do want to sort of revisit your background in a moment, but we've seen a lot of other companies that were in your space. I wouldn't call them competitors, but they were offering the same mission, have gone away. You're still here, a few others are still here. And as we talked before, I push record. You've got an impressive client base and I'd love to get a sense of your progress. You know, comparing what we were talking about when the world was on fire to what we're talking about today, when the world is at least not suffering a pandemic. There's certainly a lot of other disruptions going on, but not related to healthcare directly at the moment. But, Nadine, if you would just quickly just give us a recap as to how you, you came to, to found Proxima. You're. You're a surgeon, you were a gamer. As a kid you had a father and I think a engineer, computer engineer if I recall correctly. So you had tech in your blood and you had medicine in your blood and you found a way to, to merge the two. How, how did this all come together?
[00:25:27] Speaker D: Yeah, no, look, I mean, I think it's a great summary and I'm excited to dig into some of those topics you signposted because it is very much a journey, but it's been a really exciting one and we can talk a bit about it and, and understand the, the nuances to all the journey as well. But I think perhaps just to start at the beginning, you're absolutely right. I am a practicing surgeon. I'm a reconstructive plastic surgeon, mainly focused on breast and pelvic cancer reconstruction. And I think it's important to highlight that because there is that intimate knowledge of understanding the environment in which we are trying to address challenges with solutions and digitization which proxima obviously leads to. So being in the belly of the beast, so to speak, seeing day in, day out, those challenges, but also those opportunities, I think is critically important. And the journey of proximity obviously didn't start at the pandemic, although the pandemic truly was a catalyst and the most important, I would say, in winning hearts and minds and enabling people to think differently about how we can really find that intersection of healthcare technology innovation to deliver best patient centered care. But the journey of proximately started much prior to that. And again, my childhood does play a role in that. I mean, I grew up in a war torn country. I'd seen firsthand some of those challenges around access to care, access to expertise.
Albeit I came from a country that is incredibly developed, sort of from a medical perspective and Lebanese doctors are known around the world to be, you know, very effective. But just working in that environment showed me, you know, aspects of healthcare that perhaps people growing up and working and training in the US or in the UK and others wouldn't have seen on a day to day basis. I think that catalyzed me wanting to get involved a lot in both global health and global impact. And I was involved in a number of mission surgeries, going to different parts of the world to look at how you build sustainability and scalability and care. But also it got me excited about working with medical device companies, just trying to understand like how do they really drive adoption of their products, but even more upstream, how do they think about how their products are developed, how do they then validate them and then how do they deploy them and ensure Safe and effective and scalable adoption across health systems globally or across their customer base globally. And almost sitting at that intersection of I was delivering care in a UK health system, which is a good health system, I was working in the global health sort of environment looking at sustainability and scalability and then I was supporting med device companies on new innovative device and techniques. Really got me thinking from all those different aspects, like the status quo doesn't really work, like we have to really think about how do we bring and address the challenges that frankly face every health system. It doesn't really matter where you are. There are challenges around quality and safety, there are challenges around the workforce. How do we train upskill and bring these new techniques and technologies for patient care to into the hands of the workforce and then how do we drive productivity and effectiveness around that? And those were very clear sort of categories that sort of really precipitated after the 10 years of work I was doing. They were sort of the same really everywhere. And so if we could find a way to almost bring technology innovation into that environment and reimagine that environment to be a more digitally enabled, connected, data driven environment, you could call it a smart environment.
What would that do for the delivery of care irrespective of where you are in the world? And so that was really the thinking and it actually started back in 2012, 2013. But back then, simply as a doctor at the time, I didn't know about lots of other sources of funding apart from grants, research grants, and I couldn't really find research grants that were focused on digital innovation in the or. There was grants around diabetes and heart failure and cancer and others. But it was hard to think about, you know, the benefits of digital. And so I self funded a prototype that I we tested and evaluated in, you know, low and middle income countries just because we wanted to stress test it to see if it could work in those environments and it could work everywhere. And the results were really compelling. We were able to show that by finding a way to integrate technology into our work, you know, our day to day work plans, we could actually increase the care for patients, increase the delivery of care, increase the quality of care, but also enhance the workforce. And we showed that we could train twice as many doctors in half the time.
And so it was from that that in 2016 actually an article from CNN published could this Technology be the future of Surgery?
Finally created that impetus to go out and raise venture capital funding and really set this up to be a business.
And of course I really wanted to be very deliberate about working with clinicians and nurses and healthcare workers around the development of this product. And so we spent a couple years really on the front line with doctors and nurses, understanding their pain points, watching the ethnography of the room, watching the workflow, how do we bring in technology? And it was clear to me at the time, looking at the behaviors, the capabilities, the technological stack already existing in the rooms, the going straight into sort of data insights seemed a bit premature.
And that really what we needed to start with was some lower hanging fruit where we could bring in value to the healthcare workers, but also start to win hearts and minds around the digital operating room. And so we started with telepresence as our entry point into the digitization of the surgical journey.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: What does that look like? What does telepresence look like?
[00:31:01] Speaker D: It's just virtual collaboration. So we started with real time connectivity that I could sit on my phone, my tablet or computer and I could virtually scrub into any operating room in the world. I could collaborate, I could telestrate, I could share best practices, we could learn from each other, we could accelerate the adoption of new products and medical devices. And so there was a real benefit for healthcare workers and strategics around that immediate pain point of that adoption. And it was then, from then and I'll sort of stop and we can sort of dig into any specific bits that we were able then to unlock the further benefits around data capture, data curation and then data insights from it. And so that was really kind of the start of the proximate journey. But it's always been, and even if I go back to my early investor decks, it's always been about an evolution from real time connectivity alone to the expansion to a vendor neutral operating system that had insights, clinical benefit, training benefit and productivity benefits as well.
[00:31:59] Speaker A: So when is the official found year or found date for proximate? When did you get things? When did it become a company?
[00:32:06] Speaker D: 2017.
[00:32:06] Speaker A: 2017. Okay. Yeah.
So seven years along, eight years along. My gosh, where are we today? Where's your platform today? What does the Proxim system look like today?
[00:32:18] Speaker D: We are a global health platform. We are a vendor neutral procedure neutral operating system. We're a software with an opportunity to deploy in any procedure room anywhere in the world. And what we do is we really create value from real time connectivity, ambient data capture and collection and AI enabled insights that help you really drive the benefit both for the day to day. The clinicians working with the device's solution and their own operating systems, but also insights that can benefit the broader Healthcare ecosystem administrators, medical device companies, accreditation bodies and others. And so we've really evolved into what we'd always sought out to do, which is to be able to connect, collect and activate knowledge and information across the world. And in the last year alone, we tripled our footprint. We're on track to double that again this year. And we've seen huge growth by being very much at the center, working with health systems, working with medical device companies, and working with societies and physicians, doctors, nurses, another healthcare practitioner. I think being of a value to each of those trifecta I think is really important.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: But what, what is the this. Are you selling hardware? Cameras, microphones, are you selling cables? Are you selling space on a cloud? What, what are, what are your offerings? What is it, what is it you're.
[00:33:46] Speaker D: We, we don't charge. We don't charge for hardware, we don't charge for devices. We are really a software company. We're a cloud first company. So what we always do is we'll always evaluate procedure rooms and see what hardware already exists. And a lot of hospitals already have sophisticated integrated rooms, cameras, et cetera. And so our software can just plug into those.
For those rooms that don't have those capabilities or those hardwares, we provide a turnkey solution that's kind of modified for the proximity software. But we don't manufacture any hardware. We bring it together from the market. It's integrated, it's, it's got some software on it that we've brought in to modify it for our use. But generally it's a pretty straightforward installation. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours and you're in the room. And so we very much. And we don't do a per consumption per minute, any of that. We very much are a SaaS annual company. And I think for us it's important because we want to encourage its use every single day. You know, our customers today, turn it on the morning and keep it on all day. It's not episodic. It's not just for this case or just for that case. It's about a whole digital continuum. And that I think has been a very important part of our growth as well.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: You mentioned tripling your footprint.
What is inside that footprint? Are you selling to hospitals? Are you partnering with medical device companies? How do you measure your growth in business?
[00:35:07] Speaker D: What we do is we look at footprint. We talk about procedure rooms, operating rooms that we're in. So that's our kind of main metric. But what was interesting about what we do is that we really create value for both the strategics and the health systems. So with the Strategics, we also have our own technology, our own SDK that Strategics can actually integrate into their devices or even white label. So there are companies out there that we've partnered with that are confidential, that have actually taken our technology stack and have integrated into either their software layer or into their devices themselves. And that's great for them because they don't have to rebuild what we have done. We have a lot of subject matter expertise. We spent, you know, eight, nine years building this platform. So being able to take that and power other devices and other manufacturing solutions out there, I think is really powerful. So we bring a lot of that ability to connect and collate audiovisual data, telemetry data, medical record data. And that is very, very meaningful for Strategics because it can give them a lot of insights both on how their devices are being used, how their customers are engaging, but also, you know, how they may want to modify from an R and D perspective or other components as well. So we work a lot with Strategics from that perspective, but we also work with health systems, really helping them drive on. Those three categories I described around productivity, around quality and safety, and around the workforce. I mean, the workforce and productivity are two really big challenges that we're seeing today in health systems. And we can talk a bit more about it, but we've got real case studies with real impact for health systems, but most importantly for patients getting access to care.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: Yeah, let's stay here for a moment and talk about the impact on health systems and then we can unpack the work you're doing with medical device companies.
You're right, workforce is clearly an issue. How does Proximi help alleviate that?
[00:36:56] Speaker D: Well, I think a couple of things. One is, you know, we're able to train twice as many doctors and nurses in half the time. So I think just accelerating the skills acquisition in your workforce is really important. The second is as you see more and more health systems coming together and merging, you have, you know, disconnect. You've got teams across multiple sites within a particular specialty or within a particular area of expertise. Being able to have those experts connect and share expertise, I think is super important because it's about bringing care closer to where patients are at and they're getting that best care no matter where they are in the system. But I think the third is really understanding the insights from the or Proximy, as you may see from our videos, is able to capture lots of different views of what's happening in a room, we can capture the views of the intraoperative or the operative area, but we can also capture the ethnography of how the team is working together across the room. Obviously, we have anonymization tool, so we can blur faces, we can blur patient identifiable, but we can get a really good sense of the productivity and the utilization of that room as well. And so being able to feed back to a health system with our technology, not just the benefits to the clinical teams on the ground, but also the administrators, is hugely valuable. So we did, for example, a study with an ongoing US Health system, and we were able to show that there was an opportunity to optimize up to 24% of the OR's total time. And so conservatively, that can give you up to three extra procedures per OR per week. And you can imagine if an average health System has about 60 ors, that's an extra 9,000 cases per year that can be conducted. Now, where are the benefits there? Obviously, the benefits are for patients on waiting lists trying to get careful and getting it as quickly as possible.
The second, obviously, is, you know, the teams on the ground feeling that their time is being used as effectively as possible. They're able to get home on time. They were being really efficient about how we use their time during that OR time. And finally, for health systems, there are financial benefits to improving productivity that can be significant. And those benefits will have positive repercussions about being able to reinvest that into the system, into workforce benefits, into recruitment, into a whole host of other things that could be beneficial for the system as well. And so we're seeing that drive a lot of enthusiasm from our customers. And I think what differentiates us from a lot of people in the market is that we offer all of it. We don't just come in and say, we're going to tell you how to use your ORs better. Fine. I mean, that's important, but that's not just. That's not the only thing that's important. It's also important about how we support our workforce. It's also important about how we train the next generation of doctors. It's also important to feel connected and part of a broader ecosystem of people supporting you through hard days in the OR and nurses and others. And I think, and it's also important to understand how do we build the next generation of products and devices that are going to be beneficial for care delivery. And so by being able to sit at that nexus, I think has really positioned us as market leaders. And it's why I've been able to see the success we've seen so far to kind of the point you made at the beginning of the podcast.
[00:40:00] Speaker A: Who are your champions at the healthcare systems? Are they the administrators or the physicians? I mean, I hear folks Salesforce is a powerful company and they have great tools, but then you talk to people who actually have to use it and it's just like, ah, God, this is just more work than I've ever had before.
Who are the best champions to have in this sales cycle and who are your champions?
[00:40:23] Speaker D: I think it's a great question. And again, being a practicing doctor in a health system, you know, I always put myself in the shoes of the user and the customer and the payer because sometimes the user isn't the same as the person paying for it. And as we see in the health systems, there is a difference there. But at the end of the day, you want to delight the user. If the user is excited about the product and wants to use it every single day and sees benefit from it, then you can overcome other challenges, whether it's commercial or business or pricing and all those other pieces, the most important things that we delight our customers. And so for us, we take a dual approach and we call it a scrubs and suits approach where we have to speak to both just going to hospital and exciting a doctor is not enough. I mean, they are a very important stakeholder as are, to be honest, the perioperative nurses and the nurse managers who we spend a lot of time with, as are the administrators and the CFO co and those leads in the business as well.
And so when we talk to health systems, we actually do roundtables with a multitude of those key stakeholders and we really understand their problems and then try to address it through the technology. Recognizing that technology is only one part of the solution. It's a very important part of it, but it is only one part. It is about the buy in from the end users, it is about the benefits that we can realize together. And it's about behavior change. And so we really think about all of those things. We spend a lot of time doing voice of customer through different stakeholders and understanding that. So I think to your point earlier, I think it's not enough to just go in and talk to surgeons, although my bias would say yes, talk to surgeons and you know, we'll be able to dictate everything, but that's just not how hospitals work. And I think with time, that power that the surgeons used to yield probably is degrading a little bit. If I'm. I can speak only for myself, I don't speak for other surgeons. But that kind of power to walk in and say, I want this technology and I want it now isn't as powerful as it used to be. There are other factors one must consider. And so it's really, really important that we are addressing a challenge that everyone is facing in the system.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: So the benefits you're offering to the surgeons and the healthcare practitioners are an easier way of doing it, in addition to faster training and all that for the administrators.
Are you suggesting that the efficiencies that you're helping to create will generate revenues that will offset the price point, the.
[00:42:40] Speaker D: Investment that they make? Exactly. And in the end, if you really boil it down to the patient, which is really, this is all about. There's a benefit there on both sides, right? Whether it's about driving productivity or whether it's about better training, workforce support, et cetera, it all feeds back into best care for patients.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: So how about on the medical device side? We're seeing a rise in the number of surgical robotics companies and of surgical robotics systems being purchased. A lot of them are building their own sort of digital dashboards. They're being called their own digital data collection systems. Are you aligning with those systems? Are you competing with those systems? How does this adoption of digital dashboards or digital data collection in medical devices, how does that fit into what Proximi is doing?
[00:43:31] Speaker D: Absolutely. I mean, it's a great question, I think what's really, you know, for us, we've always considered the medtech industry as really important partners for us, you know, as we think about, you know, even what we do on the health system side, the evolution of ambient intelligence and ambient technology, you know, reducing administrative burden, reducing that is also ambient. So, so basically, let's, let's talk about a typical or. So today in an operating room, you know, the patient gets wheeled in, the nurse then has to go over to the computer or doctor, anyone has to go over to the computer and click, the case is started and then has to click again that the case is finished and ask the click that the patient has, you know, that the patient has been wheeled out. You know, all those key moments are captured because they're part of the workflow of the or. It's how we're then able to capture things like turnover time, setup time, prep time, staffing, what equipment is being used. You know, all that intelligence today is largely manually entered into the medical record systems. Now, we know that healthcare workers are spending at least 30% of their time doing administrative work, which is a huge burden. So the workforce challenge, yes on the one hand you can add more, more, more team members, but at the same time there's no, it's not, there isn't an unlimited source of, you know, of workforce that you can draw down from. It's really about thinking how do we get people working at the top of their license? Like rather than having that nurse go and spend the 30% of her time filling in the notes or the doctor having to go do that, you could actually capture that all in an automated way simply by leveraging computer vision technology, AI that could automatically go into the note and that could be produced. And that is huge benefits for accuracy of data, fidelity of data, because you're not relying on someone to go in and put it where it could be. There could be a lag, it could be delayed. It's all happening in real time.
And that in real time data creates then certain behaviors. Because now the war teams can know exactly what's happening in the OR at any one time. The pacu recovery know exactly when the case has started. And suddenly you're connecting the whole periop journey with a much more structured, data driven way, but an automated way. So that is hugely beneficial. And if you're able to unlock that value, that means your nurses and doctors spending more time doing what they should be doing, which is with patients during the procedures or getting the next case started.
So that whole area of ambient intelligence technology is really exciting I think, not just for hospitals, but for tech players in general. As you think about the evolution of learning language models, AI research around that, it's been really exciting. So when we think about partnership, we talk about hospitals, we obviously talk about med device, but we also need to talk about the tech industry and we do a lot of very deep collaboration with cloud providers, AI, ML, you know, teams, researchers and others. And I think that is a very interesting category that's continuing to evolve.
But going back to your question about the strategics themselves that the med device companies, I think what's interesting, and it was an interesting metric for me, is that, you know, about 60% of medical device companies are currently not cloud enabled or network connected. 60% in some instances. 6. 0. Yeah. And in some instances you even have, you know, people still going out of hours with a USB stick, putting driving updates, you know, swapping. I mean there's a lot of opportunity there to just optimize that. When you think about for device companies, how do they think about their opex, how do they Think about their time to resolution for their customer. How do they service the devices, how do they upgrade with new software? I mean there's a whole area there that's super interesting.
So we do a lot of work with strategic around just enabling them through our SDK and through our connectivity tools to power what they're trying to do and advance it. And then the second bit which is really interesting is how do we help them better understand the opportunity of the data that we're able to capture can really give them insights into R and D development. But even adoption of their new devices, where are the challenges? Are there issues with adoption? How do we accelerate adoption? Is it a training thing? Is it a device thing? Is it a I need to restructure the workflow in the room thing? Those are all components that again historically have been done manually, but you can actually automate these and look at patterns and processes around this that can be automated.
And I think thirdly, if we're able to augment the reach of medical device companies, I think it's really interesting because as more and more ASCs are being built up, smaller boutique hospitals, it is hard to just resource all of these centers with people in every single room. And so being able to create a digital connected medical device that's got real time connectivity, that's got data capture and that can unlock value both for the strategic and the health system, I think there's a lot of value. So we're seeing companies take on our solution and integrate into their devices. We're seeing others take it and white label it and repackage it and bring it to market as a device for them.
And we're seeing other strategics leverage it for their own internal training field support, engineering, et cetera. And finally, I think where we're seeing traction is around real world evidence.
We're sitting in hundreds and hundreds of operating rooms around the world, from cardiac cath labs to ors to endoscopy to robotics. And understanding the real world environment as you try to validate new products is really, really interesting. And so that is data that we're able to capture in a meaningful way that probably is harder for a strategic to capture as well. Obviously with all the data security and sort of infrastructure that we bring, and we can talk a bit about that in a minute. And also the right agreements with the hospitals as well.
[00:49:08] Speaker A: Yeah, let's do talk about that. And within that, I love to hear you're a surgeon. I often wonder how can this healthcare system, how can healthcare providers deal with. There seems to be so many providers that are offering this technical solution and that. And for me, like I'm an Apple guy, like I want to know where all the buttons are. If I've got all these different platforms with different things and different. How do you make sure you're not proximate? Is quieting the noise, not adding to the noise and making life simpler for the surgeons who are helping the patients who are your ultimate customer?
[00:49:48] Speaker D: I think that's a great question. I think therein lies the big differentiator of talk to me and actually why hospitals love working with us. Because, you know, again, as a doctor, I don't want seven apps in my O. Like I don't have the bandwidth, the capacity, I probably won't remember all the passwords. Like I don't want to deal with seven different applications. I know I have my medical record skills with passwords.
[00:50:08] Speaker A: Oh God, yes, you're right.
[00:50:10] Speaker D: And I'm going to have my medical record system. So it's going to be an epic restaurant or one of the big ones. And then I kind of want just the one system in the OR that does it all for me. Irrespective I'm doing laparoscopic or a robotic case or an open case or I'm doing an LA or a GA case. I'm in room 5 or room 7, it doesn't really matter. I want one system across the whole health system that enables me to connect and bring real time connectivity when and where I need it, that can collect and collate all the data from the different disparate sources. A device, a camera, an anesthetic machine, a medical record. Like you, I want something to collate and connect all of that together. And I want that system to derive insights. And those insights can be a whole host of insights. It could be non clinical, like we talked about productivity, but it could be clinical like we've got algorithms that are doing, you know, the steps of a surgical procedure or, you know, time, time in this step or that. I mean, there are so many future opportunities of what we can do with the data that haven't been even realized yet. But irrespective, I don't want to then log into six other apps because some new idea of how we're going to use data emerged. I want one system and health systems love that because they also have a multitude of specialties.
The team in the Cath lab want digital technology, as do the team in endoscopy rooms, as do the teams in the ORs. And Proximi is today the leading vendor Neutral and hardware neutral and procedure neutral system. And so we become the obvious partner when it comes to a big health system play an enterprise wide solution. And it's why surgeons like it, because they feel there's autonomy there, that they own it, it's their platform, it's the health systems platform. And finally, I think what's important in those decisions is understanding how the system was built in the first place. For us, we have really rolled up very, very few if any third party softwares into our technology stack. It is literally built from the ground up. So we have a lot of control across security data, you know, where the data is transiting, how we did, how we design the application, the tooling, pushing, releases, co development with our partners in health systems, data analytics, you know, cloud processing, all of it we control.
And so that makes for a very good partner for a system because we're very intimately then involved with them, we work with them, we give them dedicated team and access to us and they feel they can actually continuously evolve that. Because I think it's super important to also recognize that I think we're in the early innings of where digital technology in the OR is going.
The future is a very intelligent co pilot in the room with you really driving the future of surgery from you know, clinical to non clinical to up note to coding to device. I mean there's a huge exciting world there in the future, but we're just in the early innings and so we very much believe that co development is part of that. And so when we go to partners, health systems or device manufacturers and say we own our stack, our engineers are available, we'll work together, let's co develop, you know, iterations and evolutions of this that becomes very compelling as well. So I hope I answered your question, but happy to double click on any of those.
[00:53:22] Speaker A: No, no, you certainly did.
So how does a smaller company though? And a couple more questions after this. I mean the healthcare system is so large, the medical device industry is large enough.
It's shocking to me that there isn't a salesforce play at this or there isn't a bigger company coming in. That said, we've done this in other industries, we're going to do this here.
Flip side, it's shocking to me that a smaller company like Proximi can build all these things themselves and get themselves integrated into the systems that you have.
How does a small company find a way to build this footprint in the healthcare system? And that sounds like a bit of a softball question, but it's actually more of a How do you compete with the big tech companies out there? Because this is a huge market for them that they're not tapping into.
[00:54:06] Speaker D: I think it's a great question and I want to answer from a sort of a number of angles. I think first and foremost, I think it's probably worth acknowledging that at some point I would assume some consolidation will happen of these smaller software companies that are trying to address this digital space. Because there could be a world where you have a large digital surgery or sort of software company working around the perioperative space that is bringing all those technologies together, those applications. We think of ourselves not just as a platform, but we have an application layer of lots of applications that will unlock value. Whether those are all built by us or whether we integrate third party applications, which we've done as well as in, you know, apps that might look at blood flow or that might look at coding or that might look at up notes, we can start to do that. So a lot of these smaller companies that are building a very specific tool or application, we hope we can power and deploy them across our footprint and bring value to this. So I think that. And it's actually what the health systems are crying out for. They're like, please, we don't want to talk to 10 other companies, like, is there a way you guys can all work together and just bring it all to one, just to one, like login? I think as we were talking earlier. So that is something, you know, us, and I'm sure others are working on. I think that's an important piece. The second is approaching with humility, like recognizing that we all have to sort of work together if we're going to drive this category. And so Proximate is, you know, we work very well with the strategics and we work very well with health systems and we sit very much at that center between both.
And I think everyone sees the role that Proximi has to play as that integration layer that's bringing everything together. And when it comes to the big tech players, I mean, they are incredibly supportive, I have to say, incredibly supportive.
And for them, look, they want to build the tooling, the dev kits, the tooling. They may not want to go into that next layer of that intimate knowledge of like, how does the workflow in the operating room work? How does the workflow, you know, so from their perspective, they're actually powering us and supporting us to do more, to build more. They're giving us early access to technology, early access to software kits, early access to all kind, you know, algorithms, LLMs, because in a way they're backing us to win because if we win, they win and we all win and ultimately the patients win. So we very much are sitting at that intersection between, let's say cloud the front line, like the OR and sort of the oem. So we have that really nice intersection. And I have to say we've got a really great relationship with all of those key stakeholders. I mean, you could argue we could have just went after health systems and not bothered anything else and just said it's just about health systems, you're going to go for that. And look, there's validity in that strategy and I wouldn't want to discourage any of the other players in this kind of, that are doing that approach.
But again, I guess from where I sit, and I sit both as a clinician, I'm an innovate, I'm the chief lead innovation officer for our hospital.
I'm an entrepreneur. Like I understand the nuances of how these things interplay. And I think together we are stronger and working at that intersection is really important. So we've been that kind of Switzerland, if you want to call it bringing all of it together. And it's, I think that's another key to our success. So it is, it is a softball question. But, but my, my call to action, I guess on the back of that would be we are very open and collaborative. Whether you're a software company in this category that wants to join forces, whether you're a big strategic that's trying to build their own thing in house and is struggling, where we can give you a white labeled, you know, even if it just gets you to 60% of what your vision is, but you can start there and move forward. We have a lot of experience doing that. Whether you knew emerging robotics company that's raising money and trying to think about every dollar and how it spends, you know, don't spend it on rebuilding what we've built. Like take our SDK integrated as we've seen other robotics companies do and focus on, you know, your Gen1, Gen2 robots you go to market, your FDA approval and all of those components as well. So we are here to support, we believe in coopetition and ultimately as a practicing surgeon, I believe that at the end of the day it's all about bringing best in class technology and best in class impact to patients.
[00:58:12] Speaker A: Two more questions. My obnoxious question first.
We have you last raising money in June 2022, $80 million. It's obnoxious because I'm surprised you haven't raised another round yet. I'm not. And I'm saying, well, $80 million used to be a lot of money, but it doesn't sound like a lot of money anymore. How are things on the fundraising front? You're doing a lot. I don't know if maybe you're not as capital intensive as some other companies in the space who raise similar rounds at that time and now are no longer in business, but they were creating a lot more hardware than I think you are. How are things going? How are. How have you been keeping your burn rate low? And what are your upcoming plans for financing?
[00:58:55] Speaker D: It's a fair question. I think what's important to first say is we are not fundraising.
And I think we've been very good at being very focused on deploying capital effectively and growing our business. You know, as we've entered new markets, we've continuously developed our platform. We're definitely not holding back from investing in areas where we think can create real impact. And you see that, of course, by, you know, what you're seeing online when we come and speak at conferences. Like, we're constantly investing and developing in our product. We've also had great success on the back end of it, of customers adopting it, the business growing and others. And I think that is a testament to really ensuring, I think, to your question, that we delight our customers with the product. We have more and more customers wanting to onboard us and we're working very diligently with our own teams and with our customer teams to ensure that we are very effective in how we deploy capital. I think it's fair to say we've gotten incredible investors and we've got a great pedigree on our cap table and they're very supportive and excited about where we're going. But we've been very fortunate, knock on wood. Haven't had to raise since then. And no immediate plans to fundraise either.
[01:00:01] Speaker A: Yeah, no, you've got some deep pockets there, But I thought CEO startup CEOs were always fundraising, so you're just going to drive people to call you now.
[01:00:08] Speaker D: I really believe in fundamentals as well. I don't know. I mean, I do believe in fundamentals. Like, you want to build a good business, a business with strong fundamentals that can stand on its own feet, that has a path to profitability, that is an exciting business for the future. So that is important for us as well.
[01:00:26] Speaker A: Final question. When we talked last and I referenced this at the start, we were in the middle of COVID and we were all Convinced that the world was going to be different when we got out of it.
Is there a greater appetite for this than you might have anticipated in 2019, or did we just revert back to the norm?
[01:00:45] Speaker D: No. And look, it's a fair question, and I'll answer both with my proximity hat on and probably with my health system hat, because I want to give hope to so many other digital companies and technologies out there as well. I think definitely there was a pendulum swing during COVID where things were sort of like skyrocketed and Africa, and then that pattern sort of came back a bit more to sort of like center, but. And that's still a lot more than where we were pre Covid, which is like, there's nothing happening in digital. But what I can tell you, and especially over the last 18 months, we've seen huge appetite and adoption of technology, not just in the operating room, but across the whole health system, whether it's, you know, ambient in the outpatient, whether it's agentic, AI agents that are supporting with workforce data analytics. I mean, there's so much happening. And I can tell you, even just with my health system hat on, like, we're seeing the adoption of those things growing. And in the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, which is quite a British phrase. But, you know, for me, you know, I go to a lot of conferences. You got a lot of great companies that are standing up and talking very eloquently about this category. You know, they talk about AI and how excited about. We can see a lot of the buzzwords, you know, and typical, you know, in any one of these conferences, AI, LLM agent, you know, we're seeing all of that.
[01:01:56] Speaker A: I didn't ask once about AI. I want that noted.
[01:01:58] Speaker D: I know you did it.
So we're seeing all of these, you know, buzzwords, and there's a lot of really great, you know, early stage prototypes and MVPs and things that are exciting that kind of give you a glimpse into what can happen at scale. But what we've done at Proximi is we've really demonstrated this can be adopted at scale. You know, you don't, you can't just, you don't set up a team, you know, to be able to scale in hundreds and hundreds of operating rooms in a year. You need it. You need an infrastructure in your company, whether it's customer support, you know, implementation, customer success, you know, operation, you know, as, you know, once you have your system in many, many more rooms, you need all of that wraparound service. And so we've really focused on building those key fundamentals inside the business to make sure that we're able to scale onwards and upwards through that. And so that, I think gives confidence that the market is definitely evolving and moving rapidly, that we are set up to take advantage of those headwinds and that we are the best partner to work with when it comes to that consolidation, scalability, architecture ethos, the DNA of our company, I think works well around that. So I would definitely tell anyone out there who's listening to this, if anyone is listening to me, but I would say it is absolutely an exciting time. We are seeing adoption happening across systems. And I recall just being at JP Morgan in January, I went to the health systems track where a number of the health systems were presenting about their top three goals or their top three points of their strategy. And a lot of them were talking about digitization, moving to the cloud, tech enablement, so that you're hearing it from the market. And then when you look at how health systems are restructuring their leadership teams, you know, you have chief digital officers now. You have, you know, chief innovation officers, you have clinically led innovation people who are building not only tech adoption teams, but tech building teams like data science teams and AI teams in hospitals. That was not the case two, three years ago. And so that is really, really exciting to see. And I think again, it indicates where things are going. And for us at Proxim, we're very excited to be in the position we are because we are seen as a partner to these systems, both at a, at an individual specialty level, but also at an enterprise level.
[01:04:16] Speaker A: Let me ask the, your, the. Have you with your chief administrator hat on, your hospital administrator hat on. I say we've moved out of COVID But now as you're talking, I realize the hospitals really haven't, they haven't gone back to 2019, that they're still, you're still dealing with the COVID in so many ways. Not the actual disease, but the destruction that it brought. Yeah, for sure.
[01:04:39] Speaker D: We are still dealing with work. As I said, it's the same challenges that I think only got accelerated and unfortunately augmented in the COVID pandemic, which is workforce.
Every system in the world is struggling with workforce training, retention, support. The workforce is burnt out. How do you bring in solutions to reduce administrative burden, get them home on time to see their kids, make them as productive as possible at the top of their license. So that is a big challenge. The second is productivity. Like it's not because we just want to tell people you're not working hard enough, you need to work harder. It's just such a backlog. It's such a backlog. We need to figure out how we address that backlog. And you can't just magically build more operating. I mean, yes you could, but it's that is a long multi year program that needs a lot of money. And so you have to think of other ways to do that. And we will need to make sure in all of those changes that we retain and maintain the quality of care for our patients. And so again, I think I'm very, very fortunate. It's a true privilege for me to be able to run Proximi, but have that health system lens as well day in, day out, I think brings a lot of power in terms of what we're able to do at Proximi for improvement and hopefully influencing the space.
[01:05:50] Speaker A: Wonderful. Always great to reconnect with you and get an update on the space. And I look forward to hopefully seeing you at an event upcoming. So Nadine, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
[01:06:02] Speaker D: Thanks Tom. Great to see you too.
[01:06:07] Speaker A: Well, that is a wrap. Thanks so much for joining us on.
[01:06:09] Speaker B: This episode of Device Talks weekly podcast. Once again, make sure you join us at Device Talks Minnesota. Use the code DTM early if you're listening to this podcast over the weekend, fourth, the fifth, sixth and seventh, and you can get the early bird rate by using the code DTM early when you register at minnesota.devicetalks.com that happens on June 11, of course. Join us at Device Talks Boston. That happens April 30th and May 1st. Join us next week on our Surgical Robotics Week. You can find out more information about that at Device Talks. Com. Finally, regarding this podcast, we'd love it if you would subscribe to the Device Talks Podcast network. Please give us a ranking on your podcast player and give a comment as well. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast network. Also share this episode on LinkedIn. And when you're on LinkedIn, connect with me, connect with Chris Newmarker and connect with Kayleen Brown and of course follow Device Talks as well. So that's a lot. I give you a pretty long laundry list of things to do, but they're all critical and you should get on those right away so I'll stop talking. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Device Talks weekly podcast.
