Microbot’s FDA-Cleared Robot Now Meets the Hospital’s Value Analysis Committee Earlier

Microbot Medical has changed the order in which it sells its LIBERTY robot. At an analyst meeting in New York last Thursday, the company said its reps now engage a hospital's value analysis committee earlier in each sale, and that the committee's review takes four to six months on its experience so far. LIBERTY is already FDA-cleared and went on full market release in April. The clock Microbot is now trying to start sooner is the hospital's.

What the committee weighs

A value analysis committee is the group inside a hospital or health system, drawn from clinicians, supply chain staff and finance, that decides whether a product goes on the shelf. It weighs clinical benefit against cost for the whole system, and the physician who asked for the product is one voice in the room. LIBERTY is a remotely operated robot for peripheral endovascular procedures, which are done with catheters threaded through blood vessels. Microbot describes it as the only FDA-cleared system of its kind that is single-use. It aims to reduce radiation exposure and physical strain, which gives the clinicians on the committee something to weigh.

The finance people get something to weigh too. Every procedure uses up a robot, so the hospital's cost arrives case by case, and so does Microbot's. In the same update Microbot said it expects a second manufacturing line and more efficient processes to bring positive gross margins in 2027. Any committee reviewing LIBERTY now is looking at a per-case price set while the cost of building each unit is still coming down.

Why Microbot moved the committee up

Microbot's stated reason is that engaging committees early will speed adoption across health systems with several hospitals. The expansion behind that reason is fast. The company went from four sales territories at the end of March to eight by midyear and plans twelve by December. It has hired three more area sales managers and a regional sales director to push west, where it has its first California customer. A rep in one of those new territories who wins over a physician and only then opens the committee file adds four to six months before the first order can arrive. Starting the committee review alongside the clinical evaluation, as Microbot now does, lets the two finish closer together.

The cost case starts in the design review

A startup still in development can start on the committee's questions before it has anything to sell. The committee will want to know what the device costs per case, what it replaces, what it saves the hospital in time or staff, and what happens to the price as volume rises. Those answers depend on decisions made in the design review: the architecture, the disposables, the bill of materials. Each is cheapest to change there. After launch the levers left are price and manufacturing cost, and Microbot is working on manufacturing cost now.

My own lesson came from a surgical robot aimed at procedures that paid hospitals less than the big robotic operations, so the robot's price had to come in lower before any hospital would take a meeting. Since COVID, the hospitals I've sold to have had no budget for science experiments. Today's Founder Tip Tuesday video covers Stripe's habit of reviewing big projects at 20 percent and 80 percent of the way done, and a review at 20 percent can still change the direction of the work. A friendly health system's supply chain lead can sit in on that early review, and the questions they raise become design requirements while there's still time to meet them.

Dave Saunders is the founder of Base Reality Group and a Fractional CPO for product companies. He was a founder and operator at Galen Robotics, where the surgical-robotics platform earned FDA De Novo authorization in 2023, and he managed a 35-patent portfolio licensed from Johns Hopkins. He wrote Founders Who Finish and publishes The Build. More about Dave →