Technology that cares
Promaxo’s MRI system is the only one of its kind to offer real time MRI-guided targeted prostate interventions in a physician’s office. The Promaxo system is equipped with pre-programmed and optimized scan sequences making it very easy and efficient to use. It has the added benefit of standardizing images which can be combined with pathology data, thereby lending itself to an AI-based tissue classification system for screening and early detection of cancer. The non-invasive and open system design is optimized for patient comfort and positioning to provide unobstructed access to the anatomy of interest, as well as robotic needle guided interventions. Conventional robotics can easily be configured to operate within the imaging field of view to further improve procedural outcomes while reducing stress and fatigue on physicians. This creates a major shift in the point of care and brings imaging much closer to the physicians providing care and simplifies a patients’ journey. The Promaxo MRI system allows targeted treatment (or focal therapy) to be applied precisely directly under the MR guidance to treat cancer locally while minimizing side effects by sparing the healthy tissue. Combining the above yields Promaxo’s very unique value proposition that is expected to achieve quadruple aim through better patient and physician experiences coupled with better outcomes at a reduced cost.
Promaxo is improving access to MRI and MRI-guided interventions through its portable single-sided MRI, robotic and artificial intelligence platform. MRI is a proven imaging modality for screening, diagnosis and treatment planning for a large number of medical conditions. Physicians and patients have limited access to MRI systems due to high acquisition and operating costs, and extensive infrastructure costs of MRIs. As such, only large hospitals or imaging centers procure MRI systems and only general-purpose MRIs remain useful in such settings. Many patients do not tolerate MR scans due to contraindications, size restrictions, auditory sensitivity and/or claustrophobia. Field homogeneity requirements in traditional systems require large hardware that contains a considerably large-sized fringe field, thus increasing the system footprint, and requirements of shielding and cryogenic cooling. MR systems are incompatible with conventional robotics and guided interventions due to limited patient access within the gantry and complexities of MR compatible tools. Within Promaxo’s beachhead market of urology, the current standard of care involves screening with PSA, followed by transrectal ultrasound biopsies (blinded or targeted). MRI is gaining traction, but its usage remains limited due to lack of access in urologists’ offices. MRI-ultrasound fusion usage is limited because its pathway is convoluted for patients and physicians and the procedure offers no additional reimbursements.
A recent cost-efficiency analysis was conducted jointly by physicians out of New York Presbyterian Hospital, Cornell University, Weill Cornell Medical Center, The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, and UT Southwestern to see how Promaxo’s MRI costs compared to a traditional high-field MRI being used for the same MRI-guided prostate biopsy. They used a time-driven activity-based costing approach to help understand the resources, cost rates, and times allocated for each step of the workflow. This analysis demonstrated that prostate biopsies performed using Promaxo’s low-field MRI cost about $880 less than if a prostate biopsy was to be performed using a high-field MRI. Further modeling was done internally to determine an average-sized urology practice’s ROI once they’ve elected to purchase the Promaxo MRI. Because the system is able to leverage existing reimbursement codes, by using the national average for each respective code the breakeven point was determined to be roughly 16 months for a group size of five doctors who perform an average of 80 biopsies each per year (~400 annually). A noteworthy point is that this breakeven analysis did not include other MRI-guided prostate interventions, which the Promaxo MRI is already FDA 510(k) cleared to perform, meaning a practice can recover their costs much quicker if they perform additional procedures on top of biopsies or practices with a smaller volume of patients can still see a return on their investment within a few years.
