DeviceConX and VitalsConX

I started at iSirona as a software engineer and left Masimo, seven years and two acquisitions later, as the technical product manager for two product lines. The company was the same the whole time; the letterhead changed in 2014 (NantHealth) and 2020 (Masimo).

The core product was DeviceConX: middleware that took the data coming off bedside medical devices, ventilators, monitors, infusion pumps, and delivered it into the hospital’s electronic health record as clean, attributed, timely observations. The hard part was never the software alone. Over 500 distinct physical devices, each with its own protocol and quirks, had to be integrated through a distributed physical network of hardware we sold: the escort cable that plugged into a device (later renamed the Shuttle) and the Hbox that aggregated a room or a unit (later the Sentry). I led the primary product development team, ran as many as three scrum teams of five to seven engineers, wrote code, and managed the DevOps infrastructure, on a product that was FDA-regulated the entire time. In a regulated product, “we’ll fix it in the next sprint” is not a sentence you get to say; every change carries verification, traceability, and post-market surveillance with it, which is where I learned the discipline I still apply to unregulated software.

VitalsConX was the 0-to-1 product. Clinical rounding, a nurse walking bed to bed taking vitals, was still a clipboard-and-transcribe workflow in hospitals that had already automated the ICU. I was the lead engineer, the designer, and the product manager for a product that captured vitals at the bedside and pushed them straight into the chart, removing the transcription step and the errors that live in it. It is the project where I learned that shipping requires holding all three of those roles honestly, even when you are eventually going to hand two of them to someone else.