14 Buffalo Business Spring 2022
For Shawn Patterson, PMBA '07, chief commercial officer
and co-founder of Resolution Medical, the challenges come
from the high level of regulation in the field.
Founded in 2012, Resolution is a medical device contract
manufacturing company that partners with physician entre-
preneurs, startups and larger original equipment manufac-
turers to develop and build their products.
Patterson says simple devices can go from concept to
commercialization in as little as a year, but more complicated
items can take up to 10 years to come to market.
"We spend a ton of time and money developing a device
for a customer, and then we can end up waiting three years
for it to get through human clinical trials and approval
through the FDA in the U.S. or CE Mark in Europe—and those
regulations are always changing so there can be wildcards to
deal with."
Human capital is another obstacle, according to
Patterson—both in-house and at partner organizations. It's
the reason Resolution is located just outside Minneapolis.
"We need engineers with experience developing heart
valves or complex delivery systems, and service provid-
ers who do all these crazy tests we need to have done to get a
device to market—all that is within 20 minutes of our facility,"
he says. "That network of expertise is building in Buffalo now,
but when we were there we didn't have it, and that's really
important."
Fixing the future
Looking ahead, Jennifer Wiler, MD/MBA '03, sees oppor-
tunity for disruption throughout the health care industry—
both in patient care and behind the scenes in administrative
and regulatory work.
Wiler is chief quality officer and co-founder of the
UCHealth CARE Innovation Center at the University
of Colorado. Founded in 2016, the center works with digi-
tal health companies to implement, grow and scale their
solutions.
"There's a growing demand for people who under-
stand the health care delivery space as providers or oper-
ators but who have the entrepreneurial mindset," says
Wiler. "For example, we've partnered with a company called
RxRevu that has helped eliminate costs and improve efficien-
cies around the prescription drug process. These types of
Wiler
