What does the senior CMS official focused on payment and delivery innovation actually want health tech founders to understand? In this episode, we listen in on highlights from a recent fireside chat as StartUp Health co-founder Unity Stoakes talks with Abe Sutton, Deputy Administrator at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), about the strategic and practical realities of building a company in the Medicare space right now.

Abe covers how CMS's new technology-focused payment models, including ACCESS and Geo AHEAD, are creating opportunities that did not previously exist for health tech innovators. He shares the founder-specific advice he wished he had when he was on the other side of the government-innovator divide: read the regulations, understand the intent behind the payment structures you are building on, and think twice before framing your CMS pitch as a small pilot.

This conversation includes direct questions from StartUp Health community members representing companies across diagnostics, caregiving, digital therapeutics, rural health, and AI-powered clinical tools -- a small sample of the live Q&A from the original fireside chat. Getting a seat in that room, and direct access to the people shaping the future of healthcare, is one of the things StartUp Health community membership is built for. Learn more at startuphealth.com.