VentureHealth combines the best in venture and crowdfunding, and has two exits to show for it. Plus Valeant buys Bausch & Lomb, GSK buys Okairos, AZ buys Omthera, while ThromboGenics/Array, Pfizer/UCSF, and Amgen/Astellas do deals.

The prospective medical device tax, the continuing decline of venture investing, pricing challenges, austerity measures in Europe, and other headwinds continued to push against the medtech industry in 2012. But emerging clinical and geographic markets, along with an active M&A market, are providing the industry with some momentum going into 2013.

The prospective medical device tax, the continuing decline of venture investing, pricing challenges, austerity measures in Europe, and other headwinds continued to push against the medtech industry in 2012. But emerging clinical and geographic markets, along with an active M&A market, provided the industry with some momentum.

Companies with new, often implantable devices that enable the remote monitoring of patients aim to enable a new, more efficient kind of disease management. However, one of the biggest hurdles to adoption of disease management to date has been lack of reimbursement. The patients that can most benefit from disease management--sufferers of congestive heart failure, for example--tend to be elderly people that are covered by Medicare, which has no mechanisms to reimburse for disease management. So, beyond the usual hurdles that device companies face, of working the kinks out of technology and proving its clinical value to physicians, patient monitoring companies also need to find the right delivery model that helps them get paid for their technology.