Earlier this year, Resmed (NYSE: RMD) unveiled a new comprehensive brand evolution in an effort to streamline its various services.
The San Diego-based company — a leader in continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) — said at the time that it aims to serve more people and healthcare providers worldwide and reflect growing direct-to-consumer engagement.
More than seven months on from that March announcement, the company continues to expand its portfolio and move toward its more unified goals.
At AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference in San Diego, Chair and CEO Mick Farrell spoke with MassDevice to discuss what the rebranding entails, how Resmed’s offerings have evolved over the years and what the future holds.
Explanation of the Resmed rebrand
Resmed says its evolution represents a transformation into a “fully unified health technology brand,” the company says. This enables the company to serve millions of consumers, healthcare professionals and software users worldwide.
“It’s really the next phase of the future for what we’re thinking about,” Farrell said. “Resmed stands for ‘respiratory medicine’ and ‘residential medicine.’ We make the smallest, quietest, most comfortable, most cloud-connected and most intelligent devices for sleep apnea, insomnia, COPD, neuromuscular disease, respiratory insufficiency and all those needs.”
Farrell also explained that the company’s logo represents a big part of the rebrand. The lines in the Resmed logo represent alveoli in the lung, with the change from blue to red marking the oxygenation of blood. He also stresses that the rebrand reflects “rising to your highest potential.”
The company wants to deliver an option for those with sleep apnea, insomnia or difficulty breathing or the need for care in the home.
Farrell explains that the company’s 2030 strategy includes its operating model shift, pivoting to three things: product-led, customer-centric and brand-enhanced.
The company wants to increase product velocity and enhance the direction of products, accelerating more options that fit more needs for patients. For customer-centric, the company wants to recognize what the customer needs and get it there faster. Finally, enhanced branding — including new advertising initiatives — raise awareness for Resmed’s offerings.
“Resmed wants to be the solution for them,” Farrell said. “That was the rebrand at the highest level. Rise to your highest potential and sleep better, breathe better, live a better life — a longer, happier and healthier life, with care delivered in your home.”
Pursuit of new digital capabilities
Resmed’s last brand update in 2014 marked a shift to connectivity, introducing cloud-connected medical devices. The company has since made a significant effort to add digital capabilities to its offerings.
Recent plays in the digital space include the 2022 acquisition of Medifox Dan, a German company that develops clinical, financial and operational software for out-of-hospital care providers. The next year, Resmed bought Somnoware and its software designed to streamline the processes of physicians and sleep and pulmonary function testing labs as they diagnose and evaluate sleep and respiratory care test results. Earlier this year, the company acquired VirtuOx, a leading independent diagnostic testing facility (IDTF).
Meanwhile, around a year ago the company launched new patient-centric digital products designed to enhance therapy for sleep apnea patients. The offerings, including new MyAir app capabilities, integrate with digital wearable devices and generative AI (GenAI) to provide a more personalized sleep health experience while improving overall health.
(Read more about what medtech CEOs say about AI here.)
Earlier this year, the company launched NightOwl, a technology brought in through its acquisition of Ectosense. The home sleep apnea test is a small sensor worn on the fingertip that aligns with simple, easy-to-use digital platforms for individuals and providers.
“We’re putting the tech into medtech,” Farrell says. “We’re going to have cloud connectivity and empower the 10.3 million patients that have signed up for MyAir, our patient app. Importantly, we’re going to use this next generation of technology, this machine learning AI, and particularly GenAI, and we’re going to liberate the data to the cloud, and then we’re going to allow that data to be empowering to you, the patient, so they can become a part of it.”
Farrell says that, in 2014, the company launched its first 100% cloud-connected medical device. Now, he says the industry has embraced that digital aspect and it remains a big part of the 2030 strategy.
Finding a way to appeal to consumers
Medtech is increasingly moving toward the consumer, especially in spaces like CPAP. That suits Resmed and its goals, according to Farrell.
“It’s not your grandfather’s CPAP,” he said. “This is small, quiet, comfortable. Our portable device is the size of my iPhone. Our mask’s nasal parts are like the size of my pens, like a nasal cannula. It just forms a thing around there. We’ve got a fabric mask now, then the digital, that’s how we changed the game. We got ahead of our other competitors by having this cloud connectivity.”
However, Resmed can’t compete with big pharmaceutical companies and their spend when it comes to engaging consumers, Farrell says. In fact, the company faced scrutiny with the rise of GLP-1 therapies as a potential threat to CPAP therapy.
“Two years ago, I think our stock went down because everyone thought it was a threat,” Farrell says. “We said, no, look at the [total addressable market]. There’s, like, a billion people. The TAM is huge, and still will be and we flipped it around to the other side and said this won’t be a slower flow of patients into the funnel. This will actually speed up the flow of patients into the funnel.
“Nobody believed us then. But, guess what? The last eight quarters, we just kept performing, driving top line, driving bottom line and getting us to solid growth through that.”
Farrell said Resmed leveraged consumer awareness with a campaign called “Don’t Sleep on OSA,” while commonplace technologies like smartwatches can now help to detect sleep apnea, driving more patients into the “funnel.”
“Our education has been very focused on engaging with consumers as well on our own campaigns,” Farrell said. “As I think about engaging consumers, let’s leverage this tidal wave from big pharma, tidal wave from big tech, and also educate the PCP to be ready for those combination scripts. Then, for us, we have NightOwl and VirtuOx to be able to scale the flow of new patients into the funnel so that we can increase the number of patients and get them set up on therapy and treated for life.”
Resmed enhances the traditional hardware as well to ‘make CPAP sexy’
Another significant part of creating consumer-centric solutions is the hardware, and Resmed has made strides there as well.
“[Chief Product Officer] Justin Leong and his team are laser focused on that and understand the consumer,” Farrell said. “What does smaller, quieter and more comfortable, more connected and more intelligent look like? How do you make something that feels like it fits in the bedroom? How do you make something that is so comfortable that you want to wear it? They talk about making CPAP sexy.”
Resmed last year launched what Farrell describes as the first-ever mass-produced fabric-based mask. It has silicon rubber around certain essential components, but every part that touches the face has fabric for a more comfortable wear.
That mask — the AirTouch N30i — makes it easier for people to start and stick with CPAP therapy. It builds upon the company’s previous masks to combine softness, breathability and a high-performance seal.
The launch of the AirTouch N30i followed the March 2024 rollout of another mask, the AirFit F40. Leong spoke to Medical Design & Outsourcing about the design of that mask, saying: “High performance is what we’re looking for. And that’s this mask.”
To continue delivering that high performance, Farrell says the company continues to put a large chunk of its revenues (7%) directly back into R&D. It wants to continue delivering smaller, quieter and more comfortable masks.
“Where’s the invisible mask? Where’s the silent CPAP?” he said. “You aim for perfection. There’s no perfection in the world, but you can get closer and closer to it if you keep innovating. We’ve got to say, let’s make it smaller, quiet and more comfortable. Let’s make it more sexy.”
