At the forefront of enhancing patient care

Interview with Bilal Muhsin, Chief Operating Officer, Masimo

At Arab Health 2022, Masimo will be demonstrating how different solutions from the company can work together across the patient journey—from the hospital to the home and anywhere care is provided—to help care teams enhance care consistency and improve patient outcomes.

In an interview, Bilal Muhsin, Chief Operating Officer, Masimo, said: “It’s important to reiterate our unwavering commitment to doing what’s best for patient care, and we believe the diverse products and technologies you’ll have a chance to experience in person at Arab Health 2022 deliver on that commitment. Our mission has always been, and remains, to improve patient outcomes, reduce the cost of care, and take non-invasive monitoring and our latest automation solutions to new sites and applications.” Excerpts:

What is Masimo showcasing at Arab Health 2022?

Masimo was founded in 1989 by Joe Kiani with the ambition to transform pulse oximetry from an unreliable, yet critically important, technology into a trusted, reliable tool that clinicians could depend on, even in challenging conditions, such as motion and low perfusion, to help them improve outcomes for all patients, even neonates.

Back then, pulse oximetry was plagued by unreliability. The industry had given up and considered the problem "unsolvable." Clinicians were forced to live with the results: excessive false alarms, delayed notification due to long averaging times, inaccurate data, and an inability to obtain data on the most critical patients. Joe knew these challenges could be overcome, and with the advent of Masimo Signal Extraction Technology®, or SET®, Masimo achieved that goal.

I’ve been privileged to be part of the organization for more than twenty years, and have served in a variety of engineering roles, including Executive Vice President of Engineering, that enable me to use my broad engineering expertise to steward the development and release of a wide range of medical technologies and innovative methods for measuring physiologic parameters.

Almost three decades after the launch of SET®, Masimo’s contribution has grown into a diverse portfolio of solutions that include proprietary patient monitoring parameters, robust Hospital Automation systems and technologies, and innovative home health and telehealth solutions. At this year’s Arab Health, we’ll be demonstrating how these solutions can work together across the patient journey—from the hospital to the home and anywhere care is provided—to help care teams enhance care consistency and improve patient outcomes.

A key theme this year is healthcare transformation. What does healthcare transformation mean to you?

Post-pandemic, the delivery of healthcare is at a point where excellent solutions for patients that extend care beyond the four walls of the physical hospital or clinic are urgently needed. Advancements in IT gave people a taste for how seamlessly they can communicate with each other even from afar. Now, it isn’t surprising to see that they want some of those benefits to extend to how they interact with their healthcare providers.

The health and wellness devices often used in telehealth programs are attempting to occupy the space traditionally filled by proven medical devices. But because these devices are often inaccurate and unreliable, they can’t provide the same confident experience that regulated medical devices and systems are trusted to provide today (measurement accuracy, user interface, adherence to strict IT security and data privacy requirements, etc.).

By contrast, at Masimo, healthcare transformation is now synonymous with accurate, industry-leading solutions designed to improve a patient’s transition from the hospital to the home—to extend reliable care beyond the walls of the hospital. We believe that by enhancing access to care and patient data, non-invasive monitoring and tetherless technologies will make a major contribution to the rapid transformation in healthcare services provided in hospitals and homes. These technologies will enable earlier and better interventions through insightful clinical decision-support mechanisms—making them easy to use, deploy, and scale so that clinicians can call upon them to help care for patients wherever they may be.

To what extent will emerging health technologies such as AI, IoT and big data influence your business priorities?

The success of AI/Machine Learning depends greatly on the end-user’s acceptance of the algorithms involved. At Masimo, we provide the end-users with an experience that automates data-collection workflows and decision-making tasks while instilling confidence about the accuracy and security of their data. Our goal is to adapt workflows and algorithms so that clinical or operational decision support can be automated to enhance care.

What will your business be prioritising in ‘post-pandemic’ times?

Even after the pandemic abates, Masimo will remain committed to expanding the remote monitoring, telehealth, and home health solutions we introduced at its height. We recognize that the way patients experience care has changed and believe that the “hospital at home” model will continue to grow in popularity and success. We aim to remain at the forefront of that growth.

As always, we’ll continue adapting as necessary to provide the solutions that support evolving needs while benefiting from our thirty years’ experience in developing breakthrough medical technologies.

How important is the resumption of international travel to your business?

We are deeply committed to the success of our clients and recognize how important it is that we’re there, in person, to tailor each Masimo solution to their needs. For that reason, international travel will always remain important to our business, and we look forward to getting back out there as much as possible, provided it is safe and socially responsible to do so.

However, in accordance with our sustainability initiatives and our position as a global citizen, we will continue to take advantage of virtual communications when and where possible.