Bilal Muhsin took over as president of BD’s connected care business last year, after leaving his role as chief operating officer at Masimo. Since then, he’s pushed forward a series of data and AI projects aimed at helping medical staff keep track of hospital patients. The connected care segment covers patient monitoring systems and medication management, including the company’s Pyxis automated medication dispensing cabinets and Alaris infusion pumps.
The company got a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration in 2024 over its Pyxis dispensers. It told the outlet it’s completed its commitments to the agency and is working toward a resolution. Around the same time, the firm launched a new version of these cabinets in the U.S. called Pyxis Pro, along with an AI platform called Incada that pulls together information from various devices.
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What Muhsin has been focused on since joining the company
He said he joined BD because of its reach in the hospital. “We’re the only company in the world that knows what’s going into the body from our solution,” he said, referring to what’s dispensed orally or infused through pumps. The monitoring side then tracks what’s happening in real time. “With that kind of information, we can have a huge impact.”
Different AI models for different problems
Muhsin said the company uses various types of AI depending on the task. For clinical decisions, “we always want to have a clinician in the middle.”
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On the question of alarm fatigue, he noted that most current alarms are threshold-based — they trigger when a number goes above or below a set value. As the model matures, it can look at many parameters at once and decide whether a patient is truly deteriorating or just moved briefly. “The idea is, as this gets smarter, to eventually eliminate these threshold-based alarms,” he said. The smarter alarms should be more actionable. He also wants the system to explain why an alert fired. “Not only are we saying, hey, there’s a deterioration, but here are the four or five things that are highly factoring into the reason.” At the same time, he acknowledged the risk of information overload, saying “we want to actually simplify” rather than add to the sprawling dashboards common in care facilities.
The platform’s real-time data and the difference from EMRs
Muhsin split Incada’s role into two areas: workflow and clinical. On the clinical side, the real-time nature of BD’s information is the differentiator. Electronic medical records typically take a snapshot of physiological data at set intervals. “A doctor walks in, looks in for a snapshot, and then closes it, and then returns later,” he said. Incada captures the continuous waveform, so it knows exactly when a drug was infused, how much, and what reaction occurred in real time. It also pulls in EMR information to enrich the model.
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He described the problem hospitals face when trying to solve information integration on their own: “They get a bunch of vendors in a room, they try to buy an information aggregation system, hire an AI company … it becomes very complex and very costly.” BD is building a cloud-based solution that sits on top of the equipment hospitals already own. “Now, the more of our equipment in the ecosystem they have, the more valuable the data will become, and more powerful the AI will be.”
Pricing and the SaaS model
Muhsin said the capital investment is often already made because healthcare facilities already have BD’s hardware. For new installations, the company can layer in a SaaS subscription at what he called “a reasonable cost factor.” That is a shift from the traditional hardware-heavy sale, and it’s something facilities are asking for, he said. “It’s very hard for them to solve these problems with bits and pieces.”
