How to fund virtual reality: budget, grants and alternatives to buying

Updated 16 August 2026.

When an institution recognises the value of virtual reality for clinical use, the brake that appears next is rarely technical. It is financial, but not in the way people expect. The problem is usually not the price; it is the budget line. And there are more doors than outright purchase.

This page is part of the ROI guide; this one is about how to pay, not about what it returns.

First: there is no patient reimbursement

Worth being clear, because it is the first question. Virtual reality for clinical use is not reimbursed at patient level the way a prescribed medicine would be. It is acquired by the institution (hospital, clinic, care home, charity) as equipment and a working tool.

That is not bad news: it just means the route is not a prescription, it is the organisation's purchasing decision.

Second, and equally important

Medical device registration does not confer eligibility for public funding. They are separate things: registration concerns regulatory conformity; eligibility depends on the specific funding programme, its rules and whether it is open. Be wary of anyone presenting registration as a passport to a grant: we do not.

The question that decides everything: capital or operating?

This is where most processes stall, and it is an accounting question, not a technology one:

• Capital. Buying equipment. It has to enter the investment plan, carries approval thresholds and often an annual cycle. If this year's plan has closed, the project waits twelve months.
• Operating expense. A service paid yearly or monthly. It comes out of the running budget, with lower approval thresholds and no waiting for the cycle.

RVer is always the second: an annual service, with the headsets remaining ours. The institution uses it and never buys it, so it does not wait for the investment plan. Worth confirming with your finance director, before requesting a proposal, which budget line it falls under.

The routes, in order of speed

1. Operating budget: the fastest when the monthly figure fits the thresholds of whoever decides locally.
2. Public procurement: when the amount or the entity's rules call for a procedure, with the timelines it brings.
3. Philanthropy, donations and foundations: common in charities, and particularly suited to something you can show a donor.
4. Grants and funding programmes: they exist, they change, and they have to be checked case by case, at the time, for your type of entity. We do not assume eligibility on your behalf.
5. Projects with clinical or academic partners: when RVer becomes part of a protocol or a co-validation.

These are the main ones. The full list, by type of institution (hospitals and local health units, charities and misericórdias), with the status of each programme, is in How to fund and procure.

The internal case, written for whoever signs

The person approving is rarely the person using. The document that tends to pass has four lines, none of them enthusiasm:

• what it solves, in one sentence, tied to a problem already known inside;
• the total annual cost, including staff time (the line nobody adds: it is in the ROI guide);
• what you commit to measuring in the first three months;
• how it stops, if it does not work.

That last one is what gives the signer confidence. A proposal with no exit looks like a bigger risk than it is.

Test before deciding

A three-month pilot settles most of the budget discussion, because it trades a promise for your own data. What to measure (and what is not worth trying to measure) is in how to run a pilot and in “The ROI nobody can prove”.

In a care home, the sum that usually opens the budget door is a different one, and it is in what it returns in a care home.

RVer is a virtual reality system for clinical use designed for healthcare settings, whose base product is registered as a Class I Medical Device in EUDAMED (Basic UDI-DI 56006195127RVERTZ) and with INFARMED (Portugal, CDM 94571546) and bears the CE mark under MDR 2017/745. The RVer Motion, RVer Neuro and RVer Exposure modules are in development and are not covered by that registration.