Have you found that to be generally reliable? How different would it be from understanding that it’s not exactly like the hardwired bedside monitors? How much confidence do your nurses have in the readings they get when the patients are at home?

In the hospital, the hardwired setup is confusing. They have the Masimo SafetyNet and Patient SafetyNet, but the hardwired SafetyNet in the hospital is much preferred. You're limited there from a market perspective and trying to sell to hospitals. Masimo is up against the same thing as many other technologies, in that many hospitals have old infrastructure; you need services, data closets, switches, and wiring in the rooms. You have to shut down rooms to do construction, so any technology vendors working inside the hospital's walls will be up against that challenge. That might be a limitation to hospital systems adopting them. And from a remote perspective, remote patient monitoring is still pretty new in healthcare terms.

One of the other things Masimo is working on is that they've already released one version of their watch, so the idea is that they’ll have a series of watches, ranging from purely medical use to more casual use, but they’d also have the same sensors. So you’re being tracked all the time, but it’s medical grade, and it would potentially link that up to your hospital's observation because it plugs right into their monitoring. What are your initial thoughts about that? Assuming that they get 510k clearance and these are out there in the wild, do you think these would help versus having the finger bandage on and having it monitored that way because it's more discreet and not quite as obvious that you have a wire? I'm curious about what your general observations are there.

I think there are some valid points there. Certainly, the convenience factor would be huge from a patient compliance perspective. If you're looking at short-term, like 30 days, whatever, you will run into the question of what's the cost to the hardware? Is this going to be a hospital-owned thing that we try to reacquire when a patient has improved, and what does that look like from the support, maintenance, privacy perspective, and all the logistics behind that versus, is it a somewhat affordable, disposable, probably a rather expensive disposable, but is that going to be the strategy they recommend? Versus do we have this digital health hub through our hospital where you're with your primary care doctor, and they need you to get a blood pressure cuff? Here's the website; this is the blood pressure cuff we recommend. Or you've got COPD now, or your asthma is getting really bad; we think you should buy this watch.