XRHealth’s Eran Orr on VR as Medicare-Reimbursable DME for Rehab, Pain, and Mental Health

Awesome.

Yeah.

I mean, the whole thing is, it's super interesting.

I mean, if I told you, you know, if I, if we were here like 10 years ago and we were talking about doctors being able to prescribe virtual reality headsets as a DME and Medicare would reimburse it, most people probably would have laughed.

And that's kind of exactly what's happening here today.

The whole thing is really interesting.

How did we actually get here?

I think virtual reality is one of the most researched fields in medicine, actually.

I think the last number that I'm aware of, over 15,000 papers showing how effective VR is for different types of therapies.

And I think over time, when I started the business, it was roughly at the same time I think launched his Kickstarter.

But just for the audience, back then, you needed a $5,000 computer.

Everything was tethered.

You needed 30 minutes to set up a VR station in order for actually to deliver some kind of experience in virtual reality.

Today, we have the MetaQuest headsets.

300 bucks the compute is stronger and better than 10 years ago with all the gaming computers and I think the missing piece was how do you actually commercialize it and how to actually get paid for it and that was actually resolved a year and a half ago after a lot of years and due to the fact that the a lot of companies, but one specifically applied VR did a very impressive push.

And they were able to convince CMS that VR for cognitive behavioral therapy should be reimbursable.

And that basically opened the entire industry in the DME market to actually start using VR as a DME.