Medical device maker Zoll Medical is among the 1st medical device companies to sign on to the patient safety and medical device data pledge proposed by Masimo (NSDQ:MASI) founder & CEO Joe Kiani this weekend.
The pledge includes promises to open up patient data gathered by medical devices to clinicians, patients and anyone else who can help improve patient care.
It wasn’t a difficult decision for Zoll CEO Rick Packer, he told MassDevice.com today.
"We’ve always been open-architecture," Packer said. "As the leader in pre-hospital data systems, it’s all about connecting our stuff to everybody else’s stuff."
Making data available is something of a no-brainer for Packer, who views the pledges coming out of the Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit in Laguna Beach, Calif., yesterday and today as aligned with Zoll’s existing ambitions.
"From a patient perspective, providing data that comes from our stuff, moving it forward, integrating it so that we can do the best we can for our patients is simple," he told us. "We see this as an incremental tool that we can use to try to create the openness that we’ve always had and always tried to push within the hospital system."
Zoll makes software development kits that allow programmers to access their data for various uses, but some issues arise in integrating that data into other clinical systems.
"We have difficulty getting in the hospital, getting our stuff into EMRs, because resuscitation is not that common within hospitals so we’re often at the end of a priority list," he added.
Zoll also faces barriers in trying to integrate its data with that of other big monitoring companies, such as Philips (NYSE:PHG), whose systems are and data aren’t as accessible.
Masimo plans to reveal the full list of medical device and other industry stakeholders that have signed the pledge during the summit this evening.
Masimo (NSDQ:MASI) founder & CEO Joe Kiani told MassDevice.com last night that he’s “blown away” by the response he’s received during the summit.
