Becton, Dickinson and Co. (BD) has appointed longtime Edwards Lifesciences sales and marketing exec Tim Patz as the new worldwide president of BD Advanced Patient Monitoring (BD APM), replacing Katie Szyman who became the CEO of Masimo Corp. last month.
Last September, BD completed its acquisition of Edwards’ former Critical Care unit for $4.2 billion and renamed the unit to BD APM. The unit’s 500 employees remained in Irvine.
“I did my first town hall last week, and it was a great feeling,” Patz told the Business Journal in a Feb. 19 interview.
Patz spent nearly two decades at Edwards, leading sales and marketing in both Irvine and Tokyo. Prior to his appointment, he served as senior vice president of APM Greater Asia, BD’s second largest region after North America.
Patz will be based out of APM’s new headquarters located at the former site of Alteryx Inc. and report to Michael Garrison, executive vice president and president of BD’s medical segment.
Engineer Turned Sales, Marketing Leader
The last five weeks have been somewhat of a homecoming for Patz, whose career began at Edwards in Irvine 19 years ago.
“He knows Edwards very well,” Edwards Chief Executive Bernard Zovighian told the Business Journal in a previous interview.
“He knows very well the culture, how we are innovating and all the people in Critical Care.”
Patz joined Edwards in 2005 right after graduating from Georgia Institute of Technology with a master’s in bioengineering.
He started off as a rotational engineer in Edwards’ technical development program before he unexpectedly found his calling in marketing for Critical Care.
“There was a special group called Critical Care at the time,” Patz said. “The products were unique, and it was a space that wasn’t taking share from anybody. It was just trying to advocate that patients need more monitoring.”
Patz ended up taking a job as senior product manager of the Swan-Ganz pulmonary artery catheter within his first year at Edwards.
He quickly moved up to higher leadership roles within marketing and led various projects, including Edwards’ FloTrac Sensor and what’s now the HemoSphere monitor.
Later on, he got the chance to work between Irvine and China to get a better understanding of the Asian market.
“At that time 10 years ago, China was really taking off,” Patz said. “It was almost a 10-year story in medtech.”
That experience led to him being tapped as vice president of global marketing, overseeing a team of 50 people in Clinical Services Group, which does pilots with hospitals.
During the pandemic, Patz was tapped again to be senior vice president of U.S. sales and marketing, which was struggling at the time.
Patz said that Mike Mussallem, the first CEO of Edwards, told him that he was the first engineer turned U.S. sales leader at Edwards.
“Edwards took a shot on me, and we had some great success,” Patz said.
Moving From Tokyo to Irvine
In 2023, came the opportunity to take a sales and marketing position in Japan.
Patz said that he and his wife were already traveling to Japan once a year and with the country on lockdown, it was his one chance to create a working relationship there.
With him, he brought American sales principles, combining them with Japanese culture to make sales representatives more engaged with clinicians at the bedside, Patz said.
“We found a way for them to get into the hospital and really train and educate on our products,” Patz said.
Patz and his family currently live in Roppongi, a lively entertainment district in Tokyo. He said that his children will likely finish schooling in Japan before they all make the full transition back to the U.S. in July.
In the meantime, Patz said he’ll be in the Irvine office two to three weeks out of the month.
BD APM is currently in the progress of moving R&D labs and machinery from Edwards over to the new office.
“We still do a lot at the Edwards campus right now, but at some point, we want to make sure we have the facilities here,” Patz said.
Keeping the Same Strategy
In response to questions about whether the unit’s strategy will change, Patz said that there’s no need to change since the “current strategy is working.”
He said that the unit has been launching multiple products per year, including this year’s launch of the HemoSphere Alta monitor. The monitor enables physicians to assess pressure, flow and tissue oxygenation insights from one platform.
Patz echoed Szyman’s previous sentiments about growing APM through its AI-enabled smart recovery and noninvasive smart expansion technologies.
“Those two are still going to be the dominant things that we do in this business,” Patz said.
The unit’s focused on seeing where else its patient monitoring products can be used outside of the operating room or intensive care unit.
So far, the unit has expanded its sales force to sell the VitaWave finger cuff in different areas of the hospital, particularly in the hospital-based outpatient department (HOPD) and ambulatory surgery center (ASC).
“We’re looking at places within the emergency department because I think there’s a key need,” Patz said.
He highlighted low blood pressure as a serious cause for concern, citing how it can lead to issues such as acute kidney and myocardial injuries.
“There is going to be cases where patients that don’t have continuous monitoring are at risk,” Patz said.
