ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Data analytics, particularly AI-enabled analytics, is an increasingly important driver of opportunity for medical device companies. Determining the value of healthcare data, however, is an emerging field that comes with industry-specific legal and logistical challenges. One approach tailors traditional appraisal modeling to healthcare nuances and has potential to address some of its unique complexities.
Bill Hunter, a serial entrepreneur, faced a dilemma years ago: how to convince early-stage investors that the valuation of the fledgling company he founded, Canary Medical, must reflect the enormous potential of its data aggregation and analytics platforms and not be so heavily weighted toward a strategy that uses clinical data to support its innovative implantable sensors. (See “Canary Medical’s Quest to Build the Reimbursement Value of Orthopedics Data,” Market Pathways, September 19, 2025.) Hunter and his team spent the next half decade proving that the analytics they are developing improve patient care, a quest that shapes the core of the company’s business and financing strategies—and one that more traditional device companies are embracing as they strive to diversify from their core hardware businesses into providing more holistic care based on software as a service (SaaS).
Other stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem that own or manage large data sets, notably integrated delivery systems, payors, and governments, face similar dilemmas. In a new “data as gold,” era, the question becomes how to quantify the value of an intangible asset in the context of a healthcare setting?
