Joe Kiani

kiani headshot

Joe E. Kiani
'84 & ‘88, B.S., Electrical Engineering, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA; M.S., Electrical Engineering, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA
Founder, Chairman & CEO
Masimo Corporation

BIOGRAPHY

Joe Kiani runs one of the world’s most admired medical technology companies, is an inventor of worldchanging noninvasive patient monitoring devices, a trusted voice for patient safety and care, and a convention-breaking maverick.

As the founder, Chairman, and CEO of Masimo Corporation, a global medical technology innovator, Mr. Kiani has been a beacon for patient safety and innovation in healthcare for more than 20 years. Convinced that the use of adaptive signal processing could solve the problems of motion artifact and signal noise that plagued pulse oximetry—widely recognized as the 5th vital sign—he founded Masimo in 1989 to improve the reliability of noninvasive patient monitoring. Under his leadership, Masimo has grown from a “garage start up” into a successful publicly traded company (NASDAQ: MASI) employing more than 3,000 people worldwide and providing its market-leading Masimo SET® Measure-through Motion and Low Perfusion pulse oximetry technology to leading OEM patient monitoring manufacturers.

Today, Masimo is an innovative powerhouse delivering key noninvasive medical breakthroughs, including: rainbow Pulse CO-Oximetry™—the first blood constituent monitoring platform to measure multiple blood constituents noninvasively that previously could only be measured invasively and help clinicians reduce risky blood transfusions; Patient SafetyNet™—the first remote monitoring and wireless clinician notification system shown to help hospitals improve patient safety and clinical outcomes by dramatically decreasing rescue events and costly ICU transfers; rainbow Acoustic MonitoringTM—the first noninvasive and continuous acoustic respiration rate (RRaTM) monitoring technology; and Root, the new clinical informationplatform, that is expected to reduce clinical distraction, complexity and cost, and accelerate innovation in patient monitoring and care. Mr. Kiani and Masimo have helped to solve the "unsolvable" problems plaguing patient monitoring while building a substantial intellectual property portfolio with more than 600 issued and pending patents worldwide.

Committed to patient safety, Mr. Kiani is responsible for creating the Patient Safety Movement Foundation & Coalition and the Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit. Mr. Kiani founded the Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF) in 2013 with a mission to reduce preventable deaths in hospitals worldwide and eliminate the more than 200,000 preventable patient deaths that occur in U.S. hospitals every year. Under Mr. Kiani’s leadership, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation held the first Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit in January 2013 with President Clinton as the keynote speaker. Mr. Kiani has convened hundreds of leading clinicians, hospital CEOs, and medical technology CEOs from around the globe and at this Summit, launched an aggressive goal—ZERO patient deaths by 2020.

Mr. Kiani believes in turning yesterday's impossibilities into tomorrow's possibilities and challenging the status quo. This is exactly what he and his company, Masimo, have done and are continuing to do, and his passion is to share this insight, knowledge, and the entrepreneurial spirit to improve healthcare for Americans and patients around the world from San Diego State University.

SDSU Affiliations:

  • College of Engineering – Advisory Board Member

Other Affiliations:

Resources:

  • Twitter
  • Joe Kiani's SDSU Commencement Speech