Milestone Scientific adds Pain and Spine to CompuFlo Programme
Milestone Scientific has appointed Pain and Spine Specialists and its medical director, Sudhir Rao, as a development partner and member of its CompuFlo Advisor Program. The multi-state interventional pain management organisation operates 22 clinics across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida, giving Milestone access to a broad base of real-world clinical users for its computerised drug delivery technology.
The collaboration is structured around continuous feedback on clinical workflows, product functionality, training and future development priorities. Milestone said Dr Rao and his team will provide insights drawn from active practice, helping the company align CompuFlo's evolution with the day-to-day realities of interventional pain procedures.
The technology and its commercial ambition
CompuFlo is built on Milestone's proprietary Dynamic Pressure Sensing technology, which provides physicians with objective, real-time pressure readings during needle placement. The system is designed to complement tactile judgement rather than replace it, offering an additional data point when accurate placement in a confined anatomical space is critical, as it is in epidural procedures.
Chief executive Eric Hines framed the partnership in terms of Milestone's longer-term commercial strategy. "This collaboration is also an important part of our broader journey toward Category I CPT status," he said. "Working with high-volume, multi-location practices such as Pain and Spine Specialists can help us expand real-world clinical utilisation, deepen physician engagement and generate valuable insights into how CompuFlo integrates into everyday clinical practice."
Category I Current Procedural Terminology status from the American Medical Association is the standard reimbursement classification for widely adopted procedures. Achieving it would open CompuFlo to routine Medicare and commercial insurance billing, a critical step for a device that currently operates under less favourable coding. Milestone also noted that Pain and Spine Specialists' geographic footprint aligns with two Medicare Administrative Contractor regions: Jurisdiction L, covering Maryland and Pennsylvania and administered by Novitas Solutions, and Jurisdiction N, covering Florida and administered by First Coast Service Options.
Market context
The interventional pain management device market is competitive, with established players offering fluoroscopy, ultrasound guidance and nerve stimulation as tools to improve needle placement accuracy. Objective pressure sensing as a standalone confirmation method is a less crowded approach, but it faces the familiar challenge confronting many medical device innovators: building enough clinical utilisation data to satisfy payers and professional societies before Category I coding is granted.
Milestone's advisor programme model, in which high-volume practices provide structured feedback in exchange for early access and influence over product direction, is a recognised strategy for generating the real-world evidence that reimbursement bodies typically require. The company will need to translate these partnerships into peer-reviewed publications and registry data if it is to make a credible case to the AMA's CPT Editorial Panel.
The appointment of a 22-location practice as a development partner signals a deliberate effort to accelerate that evidence base. Investors and commercial watchers will be tracking whether subsequent announcements include clinical outcome data or formal study protocols, as those would represent more substantive progress toward the reimbursement milestone Milestone has set as its strategic goal.