Call it a cross-town collaboration long in the making.
Edwards Lifesciences Corp. agreed to join the Patient Safety Movement, an effort centered on having medical device makers, drug companies, hospitals and other enterprises in the healthcare field share data in a quest to eliminate avoidable deaths.
The Irvine-based heart valve maker agreed to join, announced Joe Kiani at the fifth Annual World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit, held Feb. 3 to 4 at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa in Dana Point.
The Patient Safety Movement was started by Kiani, founder and chief executive of Masimo Corp., which makes noninvasive patient monitoring devices and also is based in Irvine.
Masimo has a market capitalization of about $3.8 billion.
Edwards is the second largest publicly traded company based in Orange County, with a market cap of about $20 billion.
“An organization as large as Edwards, a lot of people need to get on board,” said Kiani, who said he approached Edwards Chief Executive Michael Mussallem on behalf of the Patient Safety movement five years ago.
The addition of Edwards brings the number of companies that have pledged to share data to 70, according to Kiani. Companies that have signed on range from the healthcare units of GE Corp. and IBM Corp. to startups, such as Anne Arbor, Mich.-based Biovigil Hygiene Technologies LLC, which markets a “patented technology-enabled personal hand hygiene compliance monitoring and intervention system targeted to the healthcare market.”
The movement, whose goal is to reduce preventable patient deaths in hospitals to zero by 2020, has now expanded to 43 countries totaling 3,526 hospitals, 2,856 of which are in the United States.
The goal for this year is to save 150,000 lives, doubling the nearly 69,000 lives saved last year, according to Kiani.
