WINNER – Life Sciences & Public Service
Joe Kiani
chairman and CEO
Masimo Corp.
Masimo Corp. Chairman and CEO Joe Kiani has built his company’s reputation by inventing noninvasive patient-monitoring devices. Masimo has accumulated a substantial intellectual property portfolio with more than 575 issued and pending patents worldwide.
By taking on the nation’s most powerful grouppurchasing organizations in 2000, Kiani became a catalyst for health industry change.
He has testified before Congress, and he and Masimo have successfully fought patent infringement battles with much larger foes, all in the name of patient care.
In 1989, Kiani took out a second mortgage on his condo to launch Masimo from his garage. His mission was to improve the accuracy of noninvasive patient monitoring.
He was convinced that the use of adaptive signal processing could solve the problems of false alarms and inaccurate readings caused by patients’ movements and the signal “noise” that plagued pulse oximetry, which is widely recognized as the fifth vital sign.
Hospital administrators and clinicians embraced Masimo’s technology. But larger companies and group purchasing organizations managed to keep Masimo out of the market.
Kiani and Masimo emerged victorious after a seven-year patent-infringement legal battle, a clash that nearly pushed the company into bankruptcy.
Masimo filed for an initial public offering in 2007, and Forbes named Masimo one of the best small public companies in the United States last year.
The company has earned dozens of industry honors, including the 2011 TechAmerica High-Tech Innovation Award, the 2011 Gold Medal Medical Design Excellence Award and the 2011 iF Product Design Award.
Kiani is imbued with a strong ethos of doing what is right for patient care, and his work on Capitol Hill and in the trenches has helped other inventors realize the opportunity to positively impact health care.
HOW TO REACH: Masimo Corp., www.masimo.com
