Entrepreneurship and investing for medical devices, with Andrew Heuerman

Andrew Heuerman, entrepreneur and CEO of The Patient Company, describes his journey into researching, analyzing, and building medical devices for the healthcare community.

In this episode, Brian Anderson interviews Andrew Heuerman, an entrepreneur and current CEO of The Patient Company, which has recently been in the news for raising $1 million in seed round funding.

Andrew’s interest in healthcare stems from his parents’ occupations, and he quickly developed a passion for small business startups, as well. Three years into his undergraduate education in pre-med, he discovered he preferred the business side of healthcare over being a practicing clinician.

As he pursued these new interests, he wandered into some product development and business classes—eventually landing an internship (and later, a job) with West Michigan-based Spectrum Health. 

Andrew credits the talented people he was surrounded by at Spectrum for providing learning and experimental opportunities. While at Spectrum, he was part of a team that vetted 2,000+ medical device and product ideas each year from staff.

He learned to ask important questions about cost of development and pathway to market. Having thousands of clinicians at his team’s hands also provided a fantastic testing ground to explore exciting new product ideas.

Andrew continues on to discuss the process of convincing investors to support your projects, and how to use regional and national grants to supplement the costs.

He then shares how he transitioned to starting and leading The Patient Company. Initially, Andrew had been working with a lateral patient transfer idea that safely moves patients without injuring clinicians. Eventually, there was a clear path for Andrew to move the product forward outside of Spectrum Health—since healthcare systems can’t sell medical devices back into their own systems.

For those interested in learning more about Andrew’s work, visit thepatientcompany.com. There, clinicians can review the technology or reach out to ask more questions about SimPull, the lateral patient transfer device.