Innara Health Bets Its Subscription-Based Commercial Model for Hospitals Can Offset Reimbursement Gap

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ARTICLE SUMMARY:

The revamping of its NTrainer neonatal feeding system with digital enhancements will enable Innara Health to implement a subscription-based pricing model that overcomes lagging reimbursement and traditional budgetary constraints associated with hospital capex budgets.

Premature infants often rely on feeding tubes to safely receive nutrition due to the lack of coordination in their sucking, swallowing, and breathing patterns. Innara Health’s NTrainer System, which has been on the market since 2009, is the only FDA-cleared medical device designed to improve oral coordination for newborns and infants born prematurely, helping them advance to oral feeding and meet neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) discharge criteria sooner. Given the constraints of healthcare system budgets and limited reimbursement, however, the company has experimented with multiple business models to fuel adoption of the device, while enabling the company to prosper.

Innara’s trajectory exemplifies how a small company selling a traditional medical device can benefit from adoption of digital technologies, which enable it to embrace new kinds of commercial models and address the limitations of relying on entirely on reimbursable opportunities. (See “Optimizing Medtech Pricing Flexibility in a Digital World: Subscripton Versus CapEx Models,” MedTech Strategist, June 21, 2022.)

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