This CEO Used to Be the Customer. Now He’s Fixing a $24B Healthcare Blind Spot
Slice of Healthcare Team
08/12/2025
Todd Dunn spent years inside hospital innovation labs. Then he saw a problem too big to ignore and joined the company solving it.
What Accuryn Medical Actually Does
Accuryn Medical builds smart, sensor-driven urinary catheters that give hospitals real-time data on kidney function, automating what’s still mostly manual today. That means faster alerts for kidney distress, fewer missed diagnoses, and a shot at catching kidney failure before it spirals.
How It All Started
Before taking the reins at Accuryn, Todd Dunn worked deep inside healthcare’s belly at McKesson, GE, Intermountain, and Atrium. He didn’t just study problems from a whiteboard; he lived them alongside nurses and surgeons. “We did an enormous amount of work observing in ORs and ICUs,” he says. “I was a customer of the company and of the problem.”
That journey made him an outlier: someone who not only knew how to build solutions, but had personally felt the gaps in hospital tech. In 2021, Dunn was leading innovation at Atrium when he first encountered Accuryn as a customer. He consulted for the company, then joined full-time to lead transformation. Earlier this year, the board tapped him as CEO.
Why Accuryn Stands Out
“The heart, brain, and lungs have vital signs we monitor constantly,” Dunn explains. “But the kidney? We’re using a gravity-fed catheter from the 1930s.”
The standard for detecting acute kidney injury (AKI) is a laggy blood test that often misses early signs. Meanwhile, millions of patients silently develop AKI in hospitals every year, one every 10 seconds according to 2024 data.
Accuryn flips that on its head with a smarter catheter and continuous monitoring. It automates urine flow and output tracking, then sends that data directly into hospital records. “We digitized the kidney,” Dunn says. “We give clinical teams alerts 12 hours earlier than the blood test, starting with stage one.”
It’s not just about data. It’s about giving hospitals a shot at preventing the cascade of damage from missed or late-stage kidney injuries.
Who It Helps
Accuryn is built for ICU teams, surgeons, and hospitalists, the frontline providers who don’t have time to guess. It’s also a lifeline for systems trying to reduce readmissions, avoid dialysis escalations, and manage quality metrics tied to reimbursement.
As Dunn puts it: “If you don’t catch AKI early, you risk longer stays, higher costs, and worse outcomes. But if you give clinicians the right info, they can act.”
Where It’s Going
What’s next? More partnerships with hospitals. More education on just how costly under-documented AKIs can be, clinically and financially. And a bigger push to make kidney data as routine as a blood pressure cuff.
“CMS already labeled acute kidney injury a hospital harm,” Dunn notes. “It’s time we shine a brighter light on it. Just like CAUTI got its spotlight. We’re protecting kidneys one patient at a time but it needs to scale.”
In the End, It’s About Perspective
Todd Dunn isn’t your typical medtech CEO. He talks about empathy, about standing inside the “bunker” of an OR, about feeling what the care teams feel. It’s why he thinks more startups should consider hiring from within the system.
“You can build a great product,” he says, “but if you don’t understand what it’s like to be in a hospital, you’ll miss what actually matters.”
