Joe Kiani is one of the most popular and richest Businessman who was born on February 22, 1965 in Shiraz, Fars, Iran. Kiani is actively involved in the fight to improve U.S. health care and promote medical technological innovation. In the year 2010, Kiani and Masimo provided $10 million to fund Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in Healthcare and is dedicated to promoting and encouraging initiatives that enhance patient safety and provide world-class healthcare. Masimo Foundation supports third-party research initiatives for development, as well as clinical studies with a focus on projects that are transformative and seek to enhance the safety of patients and outcomes, thereby helping create a world without illness, disease, and inhumanity.
On September 24, 2013, Kiani appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee and laid out five steps to help eradicate preventable patient deaths. Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said the hearing was “The most important hearing this committee would hold all year.”
In 2013 Kiani founded the Patient Safety Movement Foundation through the support of the Masimo Foundation. More than 200,000 preventable patient deaths occur each year in U.S. hospitals. The Patient Safety Movement is committed to reducing these deaths to zero by 2020. The foundation also convenes the action-oriented annual Patient Safety, Science & Technology summit. In 2020, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation was awarded a $5 million, five-year grant from the Masimo Foundation to help advance its mission and expedite its efforts.
Kiani as well as Masimo are the owners of more than 595 granted and 310 pending patents globally. Under Kiani’s direction, Masimo won a patent infringement award of over $300 million worth of damages. it resolved a case against Nellcor section that is part of Tyco Healthcare (now known as Covidien) because it infringed on its patents covering measure-through motion and low-perfusion pulse oximetry in the year 2006. Kiani along with Masimo also prevailed in the lawsuit in 2004 against Tyco for breaking antitrust laws in relation to the selling of Nellcor pulse oximetry devices and eventually awarded $43.5 million. According to the Medical Device Manufacturing Association called the win “a critical step in addressing the anticompetitive and other questionable practices by certain dominant manufacturers”.
The year 2002 was the time that Kiani got interviewed in 2002 for an article in the New York Times article titled “Medicine’s Middleman” that focused on the business practices that are employed by Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) and the dominant medical providers. The article was followed up by another 18 New York Times stories on GPOs in the following two years. Following the time that the Times report was published, the United States Senate Judiciary Committee of Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights held four hearings about these practices, in which Kiani presented evidence twice. Kiani’s work led to media outlets to label Masimo “the poster child for small medical device manufacturers” and to note how Kiani “almost single-handedly galvanized the rancorous debate over the GPO industry’s purported role in locking out innovative technologies from the marketplace.”
Also on September 24, 2013, the Patient Safety Movement announced its Commitment to Action to reduce preventable patient deaths in U.S. hospitals to zero by 2020 at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting in New York.
