LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The medical technology field spans a multi-billion dollar market, and corporate competitiveness has long been viewed as the key to staying ahead. But Joe Kiani, Chairman, and CEO of the medical technology company, Masimo, is bringing fierce competitors together for the sake of patient safety.

As a strong advocate for patient safety, Kiani founded the Patient Safety Movement Foundation to stem the needless deaths that occur in hospitals every day through preventable medical error. The goal is zero preventable deaths by 2020.

One of the ways to reach such an aggressive goal, says Kiani, is a concept called “interoperability” and he wants to use open data to create a “Patient Data Super Highway” to get to there.
“First of all, it’s the right thing to do,” Kiani says. “People are dying because of the lack of data sharing –algorithms that can warn clinicians and help them with decision making can’t be used because data from medical devices and electronic medical records have historically been walled by the manufacturers.”

Since the first Patient Safety Science & Technology Summit in January 2013, Kiani has convened hundreds of leading clinicians, hospital CEOs, medical technology CEOs, government stakeholders and patient advocates from around the globe to discuss what steps need to be made to get closer to the Foundation’s goal to eliminate preventable deaths in hospitals.

The first challenge is how to get competing MedTech companies like Philips, Medtronic, Masimo and GE to work together on interoperability? The solution is through Open Data Pledges to amass data collected by various medical devices. Data sharing is the key along with protections for patient privacy, but the prize remains patient safety. The information is there, ready for any company or entrepreneur to figure out a way to take “interoperability and with it predictive algorithms and decision support” from concept to reality.

What began with nine companies opting to sign Open Data Pledge in 2013 has now grown to nearly 100 companies, including giants GE, IBM Watson, Medtronic and Philips, who have signed the pledge. And this year, Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak will lead the panel on Healthcare Technology at the 6th Annual World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit in London. It’s a clear sign that more companies are beginning to see the need for interoperability to eliminate preventable deaths in hospitals.

“That’s what makes this year’s World Patient Safety, Science and Technology Summit so exciting,” says Kiani. “We are going to be able to bring together industry leaders, innovators and even rivals to the table in pursuit of patient safety.”

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