ARTICLE SUMMARY:
In pioneering procedural telemedicine, Avail Medsystems received unexpected impetus from the pandemic, including raising $100 million via Zoom. Now the challenge is whether the company can sustain this growth as it looks to help expand digital surgery beyond robotics while business begins to return to some degree of normalcy. Part 2 of a 2-part feature.
At the risk of stating the obvious, most device companies were hurt by the pandemic, largely because of the temporary shutdown of elective procedures and, even after they resumed, it was at a lower rate than normal, a trend that continues. The chief exceptions were areas like diagnostic testing, remote patient monitoring, and other forms of telemedicine. While Avail Medsystems Inc. clearly falls into the latter exception, CEO Daniel Hawkins did not anticipate that COVID-19 would significantly spur Avail’s growth. “In the early stages of the pandemic, I told my VP of sales that, if this situation continues, we might get requests from vendors who are locked out of hospitals, but I didn’t anticipate the degree to which COVID would cause our business to accelerate,” Hawkins recalls. “We ended up with vendors coming to our website in numbers that we never could have imagined.”
