To founders and market access leaders,
I spent nearly a decade as CEO of PhotoniCare, taking an optical imaging device from a lab prototype through FDA clearance and into clinics. Along the way I lived the coverage problem from the operator's chair. Reimbursement turned out to be one of the few outcomes that decided whether our business plan worked.
The options for answering those questions often billed by the hour, and engagement timelines ran months to years. I built Praxa to answer these questions the way I needed them answered then, fast, verified, and priced for a company our size.
Our research platform sweeps payer policies, Medicare contractor positions, fee schedules, code histories, literature, and claims data in parallel. Every factual claim goes into a ledger with its source and the date we checked it. A separate verification pass attacks the draft before you see it, and a senior market access expert, matched to your product and payer mix, shapes the strategy and reviews it with your team.
A Vantage Landscape, the full coding, coverage, and payment picture for one product, is $8,000 and arrives in under a week, after a discovery call. Most clients start there and add what the findings call for: claims analysis where payment is unclear, a simulated payer panel before real payer meetings, or a dossier where one payer's policy is the obstacle.
If reimbursement is one of the open questions in your plan, I'd like to hear about your product. Thirty minutes is enough to define the questions, the deliverables, and the price.
Ryan Shelton
Founder, Praxa
From the Greek "praxis," meaning practical action
Aristotle used praxis to describe the kind of judgment that develops only through doing the work. Practice, practitioner, and practical all come from the same root. Praxa stands in that tradition as a tactical partner for operators who need to make commercial decisions on real data.
Expertise, amplified by technology
We built our research and analysis pipelines as software from day one, then wrapped them in a quality control architecture most firms reserve for regulatory filings. A claims ledger sits behind every deliverable, an adversarial verification pass follows it, and our market access experts are driving the process.
Built and run by an operator
Ryan co-founded PhotoniCare in 2014 and led it as CEO for nearly a decade, taking a novel optical imaging device from laboratory prototype through FDA clearance to commercial use in clinics nationwide, funded by venture capital and multimillion-dollar NIH awards. He has lived every stage of the problem Praxa solves, from new technology with no code, no coverage, and no payment, to a board that wants a commercial answer.
He holds a PhD in bioengineering from Texas A&M University and completed postdoctoral work in biomedical imaging at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where the PhotoniCare technology began; he is a named inventor on it. He has chaired the boards of Northwest Health System and, following its acquisition, Freeman Health, has reviewed NIH SBIR applications since 2019, and has taught engineering entrepreneurship at Illinois. At Praxa he leads the analysis platform, the delivery pipelines, and client engagements.
On the main stage at LSI USA '26
In March 2026 Ryan joined the reimbursement panel at LSI USA '26 in Dana Point, The Reimbursement Roadmap: Charting the Path to Commercial Success, alongside leaders from Orchestra BioMed, PRIA Healthcare, Sidley Austin, and McGinley Orthopedics. An excerpt is below. The full 39-minute panel is on LSI's site.
An excerpt from the panel (2:37). Watch the full panel on LSI's site
Senior specialists on every engagement
Praxa runs deliberately lean. Ryan scopes and leads every engagement alongside our reimbursement experts and our curated research platform. Praxa engages senior specialists from its expert panel, veteran market access and reimbursement practitioners who each run their own consulting practice and are matched to the work by payer domain and product type.
The structure keeps engagements affordable for small companies and still delivers quality results and recommendations backed by decades of market access experience. Their names, and their firms, carry weight with the medical directors who read the work.
Payer strategy
People who have sat across from the payer
Former market access leaders from device and life sciences companies who have negotiated coverage with national and regional plans. They read your evidence the way a medical director will, and they shape the strategy before you meet with a payer.
Reimbursement operations
People who have run the access program
Practitioners who have built prior authorization, appeals, and patient access functions inside device companies and provider practices. They know where coverage breaks down in the clinic, and how to write letters to payers to effect change.
Evidence and economics
People who can defend the number
Health economists and evidence strategists who can hold a budget impact argument under a skeptical reviewer and design the endpoints a payer will ask for before the study locks.
Open seats
The panel is growing
Praxa is adding senior specialists in payer policy, health economics, and coding strategy. Panel work is engagement-based. We're building a completely new kind of agency, and we'd love to chat with you.
If you have spent a career earning payer credibility and the model appeals to you, introduce yourself.
Partners work through their own consulting practices and are credited by name on the engagements they join. You meet yours at scoping, before you sign.
Four principles that shape the work
| Lead with the recommendation | Reasoning comes second. If a recommendation carries uncertainty, we name the uncertainty rather than hedge the language. |
| Operator language | We talk about decisions, tradeoffs, and execution, in words like revenue, contribution margin, sales cycle, payer mix, and coding pathway. We skip the consulting vocabulary. |
| Specific over abstract | Name the payer, the number, the policy. Generic principles read like a textbook. Specific evidence reads like experience. |
| Earned confidence | Every claim in our work links to its source. We show the verification trail and let credibility follow from the work itself. |
Put the team to work
A 30-minute conversation is enough to tell you whether we can help.