Novel closed-loop platform introduces objective verification to one of healthcare’s most persistent patient safety challenges.
Restara Medical today announced its official launch as a medical technology company dedicated to eliminating hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs) through the development of a first-of-its-kind, outcome-verified patient repositioning platform.
Hospital-acquired pressure injuries affect approximately 2.5 million patients annually and contribute to an estimated 60,000 deaths each year in the United States. Despite decades of prevention efforts, they remain among healthcare’s most devastating, costly, and largely preventable complications.
For decades, the standard of care has relied on scheduled manual patient repositioning every two hours. While widely accepted and diligently documented, this process remains labor-intensive, vulnerable to staffing shortages, and—most importantly—provides no objective confirmation that therapeutic tissue offloading has actually occurred.
Restara Medical was founded to solve this critical gap.
Its proprietary closed-loop platform continuously monitors tissue loading and objectively verifies therapeutic offloading by confirming three independent conditions simultaneously: pressure falls below a patient-specific threshold, the offloading is sustained for a validated duration, and relief occurs precisely over the at-risk sacral tissue. Rather than simply documenting that a patient was repositioned, the platform verifies that the intended therapeutic outcome was achieved.
“Current pressure injury prevention protocols measure compliance with a process—not achievement of a therapeutic outcome,” said Dr. Austin Kluis, founder and inventor of Restara Medical, board-eligible general surgeon, graduate of the General Surgery Residency at Baylor University Medical Center, and cosmetic surgery fellow. “Throughout my surgical training, I repeatedly cared for patients who developed devastating pressure injuries despite documented adherence to existing prevention protocols. The problem isn’t simply whether patients are turned—it’s that today’s standard of care cannot objectively verify that vulnerable tissue has actually been unloaded. We believe objective verification represents the next evolution in pressure injury prevention.”
Unlike existing support surfaces or subjective risk assessment tools such as the Braden Scale, Restara Medical’s platform is designed to generate a Verified Offload Record (VOER)—an objective, audit-ready record demonstrating that therapeutic tissue offloading has occurred. By replacing subjective documentation with measurable physiologic verification, the platform has the potential to improve patient outcomes while providing hospitals with robust evidence to support quality improvement initiatives, regulatory compliance, and risk reduction.
As a portfolio company of VIC Technology Venture Development (VIC Tech), Restara Medical will use its initial seed financing to execute a twelve-month development plan that includes completion of a bench-validated prototype, an FDA Pre-Submission meeting, and partnerships with leading hospital systems to initiate early clinical feasibility studies. The company’s initial commercial strategy targets intensive care units and other high-risk inpatient environments, positioning health systems ahead of expanding federal reporting requirements for hospital-acquired pressure injuries.
“Our mission is straightforward,” Dr. Kluis added. “Every hospitalized patient deserves objective, reliable protection from a preventable injury. We believe the future of pressure injury prevention isn’t simply documenting care—it is verifying that care produced the intended therapeutic outcome.”
For more information, visit restaramed.com
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