Arbor and Mobia Updates, New VNS Study, Managing Regulatory and Payments, More
Nov 2, 2026
• FEATURED ARTICLES •
The journey to securing reimbursement for a new medical device involves three critical steps: obtaining a CMS code, securing Medicare coverage (via national and local coverage determinations, and Medicare administrative contractors), and establishing payment levels. During the first step, securing a permanent CMS and HCPCS reimbursement code is a multi-year endeavor. To provide reimbursement during these early years, CMS issues temporary “C-codes” for some medical devices soon after FDA Premarket Approval. Valid for two to three years, these C-codes enable devices to receive transitional pass-through payments at both hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers.
FSAs and HSAs hold tax advantaged money that never touches a payer contract nor a CPT code. Reaching these funds means choosing among a retail list, a clinician’s letter, an FDA pathway, and a reimbursement form, each with a different tradeoff on what a neurotech company can claim.
Vagus nerve stimulation, long heralded as a neuromodulatory technology acting through autonomic nerve connections, may also work by tuning the physical behavior of blood vessels in the brain. A new mouse study from researchers at Tohoku University adds weight to the view that the autonomic interface between body and brain can shape learning by altering vascular dynamics after training.
A newly published article in the journal Bioelectronic Medicine, authored by several pioneers in the field, outlines many of the achievements produced by the NIS’s SPARC program, which ended in 2025. The SPARC program—Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions—was launched in 2015 with a practical and ambitious premise: bioelectronic medicine would not scale clinically unless the field first built a shared precompetitive foundation for understanding, accessing, stimulating, recording, and modeling the peripheral nervous system.
Philip Sabes, CEO of Arbor Neuroscience and cofounder of Neuralink, suggests in a recent company blog post that we are taking the same, woefully inadequate approach to treatment. “A diagnosis is a category, agreed on by convention. Symptoms are what a particular person actually experiences,” he noted. “Two people with the same diagnosis can look very different.”
Formerly known as MicroTransponder, Austin, TX-based Mobia Medical is commercializing Vivistim, an implanted vagus nerve stimulation system indicated for use during rehabilitation therapy to reduce upper-extremity motor deficits and improve motor function in chronic ischemic stroke patients with moderate to severe arm impairment.
A new high-speed microscope from MIT could give neuroscientists a more direct way to observe how neurons communicate across an entire brain—an advance with implications for basic neuroscience, neurotechnology tool development, and future efforts to map distributed neural circuits in real time.
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