AHF Podcast

Episod

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  The 2026 Shark Tank Winners Rethinking Surgical Imaging 14.08.2026 57min

  Send us Fan Mail What if the C-arm you already own could show you the entire pelvis — in real time, with less radiation? The winners of the 2026 AHF Shark Tank believe it can, and they built the system to prove it. Dr. Dean Cole, an orthopedic trauma surgeon with roughly 40 patents and designs licensed across the industry, and Scott Banks, PhD, who has spent nearly four decades quantifying how joints actually move under fluoroscopy across more than 200 published papers, join Joe Schwab to te...
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  Operation FUBAR: Eight Challenging Hips with Nick Mast 07.08.2026 55min

  Send us Fan Mail What do you do when the foot slips out of the traction boot mid-case — and a manageable periprosthetic fracture becomes a femur in pieces? Dr. Nick Mast has an answer, because it happened to him. Nick Mast, a hip and pelvis surgeon in private practice in San Francisco, trained under Joel Matta at the Hip and Pelvis Institute in 2007–2008 and completed hip preservation training in Europe. He's also a second-generation surgeon — son of fracture-surgery pioneer Jeff Mast — and ...
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  Complex primary THA with AA (S+N Surgeon Roundtable) 31.07.2026 57min

  Send us Fan Mail What do you do the moment a calcar crack appears? Where does the cup go when the spine won't move? And which complex primary belongs in an ASC — and which one absolutely doesn't? This episode launches a six-part surgeon roundtable series recorded in partnership with Smith+Nephew — peer-to-peer conversations aimed at one thing: practical, reproducible techniques you can take back to your operating room. First up, the complex primary total hip: severe dysplasia, post-traumatic...
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  From Idea to Market: Ep 12 - From Here, It's Yours 24.07.2026 25min

  Send us Fan Mail In the finale of From Idea to Market, the surgeons, engineers, founders, attorneys, and investors who lived every stage of medical device innovation look back and answer one question: what do they wish they had known from the start? Across this series, one pattern kept surfacing: innovation doesn't begin with a business plan. It begins with a clinical problem someone can't let go — a resident watching a procedure that felt inadequate and carrying that feeling for twenty-five...
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  From Idea to Market: Ep 11 - Built to Last or Built to Sell? 17.07.2026 28min

  Send us Fan Mail Is your med tech company built to last, or built to sell? Voices from inside Stryker, XRSynergies, FIOS Health, and physician contract law explain why exit strategy is a design choice founders make on day one — whether they realize it or not. In 2024, med tech M&A reached a record $474 billion in global transaction value. For most successful device startups, the path to broad patient reach runs through acquisition — and that reality shapes how experienced founders struct...
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  Operation FUBAR: One-in-Six-Million Bone 03.07.2026 43min

  Send us Fan Mail What do you do when the greater trochanter shears off during a routine hip replacement — and the bone is too soft to hold a screw? Dr. Jeff Barry of UCSF walks through two intraoperative disasters in the same patient, and how he salvaged both. Jeff Barry, who directs the Hip and Knee Arthroplasty Fellowship at UCSF and co-directs the Arthroplasty for the Modern Surgeon course, joins Joe Schwab for an Operation FUBAR case review most surgeons will recognize with a wince: a fr...
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  Mapping How the World Really Does Hip Replacement 26.06.2026 21min

  Send us Fan Mail How does hip replacement practice really differ from one country to the next? Researcher Irrum Afzal joins the AHF Podcast to discuss the Global Arthroplasty Practice Survey (GAPS) — the first effort to map how surgeons worldwide actually perform total hip replacement. Despite roughly seventy years of modern hip replacement, there's still no global consensus on the fundamentals — surgical approach, fixation, bearing surface, or the perioperative pathway. National joint regis...
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  From Idea to Market: Ep 10 - What Breaks at Scale 22.05.2026 32min

  Send us Fan Mail What real-world use reveals about a medical device that no clinical trial ever could — and why the most dangerous moment in med tech innovation often comes after success, not before. A conversation about the fatigue failures, reimbursement gaps, and feedback breakdowns that surface only at scale. For ten episodes, the From Idea to Market series has followed medical innovation through every threshold an idea must survive — the first clinical insight, the years of iteration, t...
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  FITM Extended Interview: Alexander Sah 19.05.2026 23min

  Send us Fan Mail Alex Sah on what it actually takes for a practicing surgeon to develop new orthopaedic tools — from first idea to OR adoption. An honest conversation about mentors, mistakes, AI, and knowing when to walk away from a collaboration. Most surgeons spot problems in the OR daily and quietly adapt to the limits of existing tools. Alex Sah, a high-volume hip and knee surgeon in Silicon Valley and Chief Medical Officer at Think Surgical, has chosen instead to engage directly with i...
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  From Idea to Market: Ep 9 - Inside the Decision Room 15.05.2026 33min

  Send us Fan Mail What med tech investors and strategic acquirers actually evaluate when a founder walks into the room — and what separates the pitches that earn capital from those that don't. A conversation drawn from people who've sat on both sides of the table. For nine episodes, the From Idea to Market series has followed innovation from the founder's perspective — the problem noticed in a clinic, the iteration through years of prototypes, the regulatory climb, the manufacturing scale-up. ...
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  FITM Extended Interview: Charles Lawrie (FIOS Health) 12.05.2026 31min

  Send us Fan Mail Charles Lawrie, MD — president of the Anterior Hip Foundation and a high-volume anterior approach hip and robotic knee surgeon in Miami — walks us through how a frustration in his own clinic became FIOS Health, an AI-powered patient communication platform now used in orthopaedic practices across the United States. This is an extended From Idea to Market conversation about the often lonely process of turning a clinical observation into a commercialized med-tech product, and wh...
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  From Idea to Market: Ep 8 - Built to Run 08.05.2026 38min

  Send us Fan Mail What does it actually take to move a medical device from a working prototype to a product that can be built reliably at volume? In this episode of From Idea to Market, surgeons, founders, and attorneys describe the discipline that separates an approved device from a scalable company. Most medical device teams underestimate what happens after a prototype works. Manufacturing at scale is a different problem from manufacturing at all, and the assumption that the hard work is do...
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  FITM Extended Interview: Emily Ast 01.05.2026 35min

  Send us Fan Mail There is no such thing as an off-the-record innovation discussion. Even a casual conversation over drinks can create a factual record of idea sharing that impacts patent ownership, joint development leverage, and your negotiating position for years. Emily Ast, a contract attorney whose practice is 75 percent orthopedics, explains exactly what surgeon innovators need to know before they say a word to anyone — including friends and family. Ast breaks down the two main contract...
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  FITM Extended Interview: XRS Medical (Marie-Isabelle Batthyány) 28.04.2026 48min

  Send us Fan Mail A patient had already signed every document — but no one had told her she would lose her stomach. That moment early in her anesthesia training convinced Marie-Isabelle Batthyány that informed consent was fundamentally broken. Years later, she built XRS Medical, a VR platform that replaces paper consent forms with immersive, avatar-delivered patient education and tracks attention in real time using a patented eye-tracking algorithm. Batthyány walks through exactly what happen...
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  FITM Extended Interview: Simon Mifsud (Garland Surgical, Ltd.) 24.04.2026 35min

  Send us Fan Mail Garland Surgical's flagship product, the TriActiv Hip (formerly known as the MaltaHip), replaces the ball-and-socket geometry that has defined hip arthroplasty for 120 years with a cylindrical bearing system inspired by the biomechanics of the ankle joint. Simon Mifsud, CEO of Garland Surgical, explains how this design virtually eliminates dislocation risk and reduced wear by 75 percent in accelerated testing. Mifsud walks through how the cylindrical design achieves its stab...
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  From Idea to Market: Ep 7 - Beyond Clearance 17.04.2026 40min

  Send us Fan Mail Your device just got FDA clearance. So why isn't anyone using it? In this episode of From Idea to Market, Joe Schwab and a panel of surgeons, engineers, and MedTech leaders explore why regulatory approval is only the beginning — and what it actually takes to earn a place in the operating room. Clearance tells you a device is safe and effective. It doesn't tell you whether a busy surgeon will change their workflow, whether a procurement committee will approve it, or whether a...
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  FITM Extended Interview: Charlie DeCook 14.04.2026 29min

  Send us Fan Mail Charlie DeCook has exited seven medical device companies while performing 1,500 joint replacements a year — all packed into three clinical days per week. In this extended interview, he breaks down exactly how he evaluates new technologies and why he now filters every opportunity through an AI and robotics lens. DeCook traces his entrepreneurial arc from his first venture in surgical impaction — a product that eventually sold to Johnson & Johnson and became Kincise — thro...
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  From Idea to Market: Ep 6 - The Valley Between Idea and Approval 10.04.2026 26min

  Send us Fan Mail What actually happens between building a medical device and getting it approved? In this episode of From Idea to Market, we walk through the regulatory valley that separates a working prototype from a cleared product — and why so many promising innovations stall right here. This is the stage where progress stops being about what you can build and starts being about what you can prove. Joe Schwab breaks down the FDA's device classification system, the critical difference betw...
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  FITM: The Extended Conversation with Doug Fairbanks 07.04.2026 43min

  Send us Fan Mail Doug Fairbanks left a robotics commercialization role at Johnson & Johnson to lead a deep tech startup most surgeons had never heard of. In this conversation, the president and CEO of VISIE Inc. explains why — and what their continuous anatomic auto tracking technology could mean for the future of robotic-assisted surgery. VISIE started as Advanced Scanners, a company founded by optical physicist Aaron Bernstein to solve the problem of brain shift during cranial procedur...
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  From Idea to Market: Ep 5 - Financing the Journey 03.04.2026 27min

  Send us Fan Mail Most MedTech founders think financing is about getting enough money to keep building. But once you take capital, it reshapes your governance, your priorities, and your pace — and some consequences don't surface for years. In this episode of the AHF Podcast's From Idea to Market series, we explore what funding actually buys beyond time and resources, how capital decisions redistribute power within a startup, and which financing consequences only become visible years later. Fou...