The Casana Blueprint: Building a Medtech Company in a Post-COVID World

The pandemic fundamentally reshaped healthcare delivery, creating unprecedented opportunities for home health monitoring. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Casana CEO Austin McChord reveals how this shift influenced their strategy for bringing a medical device to market.

The COVID Catalyst

“COVID is really what made a lot of this possible,” Austin explains. “All of a sudden, people became so much more comfortable doing health stuff at home, and doctors became so much more comfortable thinking about readings and data that people generate at home.”

This behavioral shift proved crucial for Casana’s health-monitoring toilet seat. What might have seemed too unconventional pre-pandemic suddenly aligned with emerging healthcare trends.

Adapting Clinical Trials

The pandemic also reshaped how Casana approached product validation. “Clinical trials is basically your only path to beta testing a med device kind of product,” Austin notes. These trials revealed unexpected market enthusiasm: “The biggest thing is just how many times people are like, ‘oh, man, I want to get one of these for my mom or dad or somebody they know.'”

Redefining Home Health Monitoring

Casana’s approach capitalizes on the increased acceptance of home healthcare solutions. As Austin describes it, their product “works best when forgotten about… you install it on a toilet, and then you can just forget that it’s there and it will do its job. It will track your vitals, and when things go south, it will notify your doctor that you need to make a change.”

This passive monitoring approach addresses a key challenge in post-COVID healthcare: maintaining consistent patient data without requiring active participation.

Navigating Regulatory Requirements

Even with increased openness to home health solutions, FDA requirements remain rigorous. “You can’t do something like, say, our toilet seat is made out of the same stuff as other toilet seats, so it’s safe,” Austin explains. Instead, they had to conduct extensive testing, including “biocompatibility testing, where they literally have to tape parts of the toilet seat to the side of a living animal for a period of time.”

Reimagining Healthcare Business Models

The pandemic also influenced Casana’s revenue strategy. “Medicare will pay to have a lot of those vitals tracked for the right patients because it couldn’t matter so much,” Austin notes. “There’s an ability to get reimbursed both by the government and by private insurance for being able to track these core important vitals in at risk populations.”

Looking Ahead

Austin’s vision extends beyond the immediate post-COVID landscape. “This product, unlike almost anything else you could work on, we’ll directly save people’s lives when it’s in the market.” Looking three to five years ahead, he sees “hundreds of thousands of seats in the world, and they’re saving lives every month, every week, every day.”

For founders building in the post-COVID healthcare space, Casana’s experience highlights how pandemic-driven changes created opportunities for innovative approaches to home health monitoring. The key lies in balancing these new opportunities with traditional regulatory requirements while maintaining focus on meaningful health outcomes.