Soleforce, Inc., a new digital health startup based in New York City and incubated out of the Hospital For Special Surgery (HSS), is looking for an energetic and resourceful Chief Executive Officer (or CEO) to join its founding team. Soleforce, Inc. markets the SOLEFORCE™, a patented device that helps patients successfully recover from lower limb injuries. The SOLEFORCE™ allows fractures to heal by ensuring the proper weight distribution on an injured limb and greatly reduces the possibility of damaging hardware, bones, ligaments and tendons post surgery. The SOLEFORCE™ displays how much weight is being applied to an affected limb in real time and outputs sensory notifications that ensure the patient remains at or below prescribed weight-bearing targets. Information from the device is shared with physicians and physical therapists who can use the data to monitor a patient’s progress and customize the care plan. The SOLEFORCE™ addresses a major unmet need in a large market that includes approximately 2 million lower limb injuries per year in the United States alone. The device is FDA-cleared (via Class II 510(k) exemption) and the patent for the underlying sensing technology was issued in early 2017. A pilot clinical study demonstrating safety and efficacy has already been completed, and additional studies are being planned. More information about the opportunity can be found here.

Interested applicants should contact Jean-Luc Neptune at je************@***il.com.

• Keynote presentation on how to create seamless health care experiences to meet the needs of consumers by Mark Ganz, CEO of Cambia Health.
• Panel discussion on the opportunities, roadblocks, and regulations within the field of digital therapeutics by Bakul Patel, Associate Director for Digital Health at the FDA.
• Investment Strategies Past and Present: a look into 2017 trends, surprises, and flops. plus predictions for 2018 by VC firms GE Ventures, Canaan, Fifty Years, NEA, and B Capital Group.
• Fireside chat between 4 VCs and their CEOs on their relationship and investment models
• Access to the Investor Breakfast where start-ups and investors discuss business models and explore portfolios. Start-ups apply here.
• Live demos from some of the most innovative companies in the digital healthcare space.

BY ROGER COLLIER

Unnoticed by most of the media, the Congressional Budget Office recently released a report that could profoundly change American seniors’ healthcare coverage.

The report updates a 2013 CBO analysis of the potential impact of switching Medicare to a premium support system. Under such a system private plans would compete with the traditional fee-for-service plan much like today, but with a big difference. Whereas now, for most beneficiaries, Part A is free and Part B requires a modest premium, under premium support the government would pay only up to regional benchmark amounts for Parts A and B together. Seniors choosing a plan (or the FFS option) priced above the benchmark would pay the difference.

The concept isn’t new. Over the past twenty years, various versions have been proposed by bipartisan commissions and—more recently—by Republican budgeters in Congress. What is new is the projected magnitude of the federal budget savings.

Both CBO analyses looked at two options for setting the benchmarks, either as the average of all bids (including the projected FFS cost) for a region, or as the lower of the FFS cost and the second lowest private plan bid. The differences between the projections in the two analyses, four years apart—and the numbers themselves—are huge.

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By JOE FLOWER

I am spending this month in the English Midlands in Stratford-on-Avon hard by the canal, the Bard’s town of quaint half-timbered Tudor pubs with “established 1482” on the plaques, and I am thinking about medical technology. I am here with Jenni to support her older brother as he goes through open-heart surgery and recovery. We have spent hours watching the ICU monitors.

The other night I watched a BBC documentary about the development of the Concorde, the supersonic aircraft. Beautiful plane, impressive technology for the time. Ridiculously expensive. Ultimately abandoned as not easily profitable and of limited use for a limited market.

The designers of the plane were quite proud of it, even as old men talking to the documentary cameras. They well should be, as it was a formidable technological achievement. One of the pilots talked about how many passengers would leave London at 10:30 am, arrive in New York at 9:30 am, conduct a day’s business, then ride the Concorde back to London in the evening, at $8,000 for round trip.

Here is the shocking take-away from the documentary. When they had finished the plane and were shopping it around, a number of countries complained about the noise, the sonic booms it would generate over every inch of its flight path. Eventually they sold zero planes, and the only airlines that put the Concorde into regular service were Air France and British Airways, the national carriers of the two countries that built it. That is not what is shocking. This is what is shocking: This was a surprise to them. The promoters and designers had apparently never considered that people might object to the noise. Never even thought about it.

Nor, it turns out, had they ever fully considered the cost/benefit ratio: Even at very high ticket prices, even at relatively full utilization, even when British Airways was given the planes for £1 each by the British government without having to shoulder any of the vast and deep more-than-decade-long development costs, the Concorde was hard to make a profit from. The crash of a Concorde in Paris in 2000, then 9/11 with its prolonged drop in air travel, spelled the beginning of the end. By 2003 both airlines had withdrawn the entire fleet from service and given up on the beautiful but flawed Concorde.

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