MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Patient monitoring devices maker Masimo this week touted the "great success" of its 1st Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit, touting a groundswell of support from hospitals and medical technology companies.

Masimo updated its progress toward its stated goal of eliminating preventable deaths by 2020, illustrating the problem with a couple of grim examples.

"When we lost 3,000 people in the 9/11 tragedy, we created Homeland Security, the TSA, spent four trillion dollars on two wars and put our soldiers and innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan in harm’s way," Masimo CEO and Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation & Competition in Healthcare founder and chairman Joe Kiani said in prepared remarks. "Yet we lose more than 3,000 people a week in U.S. hospitals alone, and no Patient Safety Security department has been created and the government has not declared war on these preventable deaths."

Researchers estimate that there are more than 200,000 preventable deaths each year in U.S. hospitals alone, "equivalent to 2 jumbo jet passenger airplanes crashing and killing all passengers, on a daily basis," according to a press release.

The PSSTS summit, which took place last month, aimed to coordinate efforts among medical device makers and other healthcare industry groups to develop better patient monitoring systems and "establish recipes to eliminate preventable deaths." As part of those efforts, Masimo asked medical device makers to pledge to open up their devices to share data and develop interoperability around patient care and monitoring.

Nine prominent medical device companies signed the pledge by the end of the conference, including leaders from GE Healthcare Systems (NYSE:GE), Smiths Medical, Zoll Medical(NSDQ:ZOLL) and Fujifilm Holdings (TSE:4901).

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