The $95 Laryngoscope

Paramedics still intubate with direct laryngoscopy in a lot of places for one simple reason.

The better device costs too much.

Video laryngoscopy is not new. It is just still priced like many EMS systems have money to burn.

That never seemed like a technology problem to me.

The clinical argument for video was already won. The operational argument was not.

That distinction matters a lot more than people think. In medicine, we like to act as if evidence alone drives adoption. Usually it does not. The workflow, the budget, and the friction of implementation decide what actually gets used.

That sounds obvious once you say it plainly, but entire product categories still get built as if the opposite were true. People talk about outcomes and ignore deployment. Then they wonder why the device never leaves the booth, the pilot, or the slide deck.

The Problem

Video laryngoscopy has been standard in hospitals for years. Better view. Better first-pass success. Fewer bad airways missed in the dark.

But the prehospital environment, where conditions are worse and help is farther away, got left behind.

That is backward. If you are working an airway in an emergency department with backup, lighting, respiratory therapy, and a full room, you have options. If you are working an airway in the field, in a cramped house, on the side of the road, or in the back of a truck, you have much less margin for error. That is exactly where better visualization should not be treated like a luxury item.

The barrier was not technology. It was the full package of cost, cleaning, charging, repairs, and replacement.

That matters because adoption decisions are rarely about a single spec. They are about whether the device fits the workflow, the budget, and the amount of chaos the department already deals with.

That is where a lot of medical device teams lose the plot. They build for the clinical ideal and ignore the operational reality. Then they act surprised when the product gets praised in theory and ignored in procurement.

For a small department, a few thousand dollars per unit plus maintenance is enough to kill the purchase before the conversation even starts.

And once that happens, all the evidence in the world does not matter. You are not competing on airway visualization anymore. You are competing on whether the chief can get the thing through budget this quarter.

That is the part people with no operational exposure tend to miss. Nobody is sitting around doing an abstract comparison of clinical elegance. They are asking whether the thing will break, whether it will create one more training burden, whether it will disappear into a closet once the charger goes missing, and whether the money would be better spent somewhere else.

Our Approach

IntuBlade is a single-use USB-C video laryngoscope that costs $95. Plug it into a phone or tablet. Get the airway view. Intubate. Dispose of it.

No cleaning. No batteries. No repair cycle.

That kind of simplicity is not cosmetic. It changes who can use the device, who can stock it, and who can say yes without creating another operational headache for the team.

That is really what I cared about. I was not interested in making one more premium airway device for systems that already had options. I wanted to change the access equation for the places that had been priced out.

At that price, the math changes. A department that could not justify one expensive reusable unit can start thinking about putting video on every truck.

And that changes the conversation in a way a marginally better premium device never will. When video becomes common instead of rationed, the standard of care starts to move with it. It stops being the special tool. It becomes the expected one.

That is the real point. Not a nicer spec sheet. Broader access.

I think a lot of device companies miss that. They keep building for the buying committee slide deck instead of building for deployment reality. In EMS, if the thing is too expensive or too annoying, it does not matter how elegant the engineering is.

That is also why I care about simplicity at the level of training and use. If the setup is fussy, if the logistics are annoying, if the replacement cycle is painful, the product is going to lose energy every step of the way. People do not adopt devices in a vacuum. They adopt them inside tired systems.

That matters in EMS more than almost anywhere else. The environment is already unforgiving. If the device asks for extra patience, extra maintenance, or extra explanation every time it shows up, you have designed friction into the product. Friction is not a side issue. In practice it is one of the main reasons useful tools fail.

What’s Next

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the device cheap enough, simple enough, and deployable enough that a department could actually say yes.

That includes the FDA path, manufacturing, and donation channels for places that need airway tools and rarely get them.

The donation piece matters to me for the same reason the price point matters. There are a lot of places where the clinical need is obvious and the equipment never shows up. If the device only works as a domestic pricing exercise, that is not enough.

The technology already existed. The broken part was access.

That is still how I think about the whole category. Not as an invention problem. As an access problem.

That is also why I think a lot of medical technology gets framed incorrectly. People love to talk about innovation as if the hard part is coming up with something clever. Sometimes the hard part is building something plain enough, cheap enough, and deployable enough that it actually reaches the people who need it. That is the kind of work I care about more.