Thanks, everybody, for joining us for this next session. I'm Matt Taylor, the U.S. medical supplies and devices analyst here at Jefferies. I'm pleased to be joined by management here from Masimo. We're meant to have a fireside chat for about 25 minutes. I'm pleased to introduce Eli Kammerman, who's the Vice President of Investor Relations at the company. We always like to start a little bit high level, and I'll join you here at the table in a second. Eli, maybe you could just talk a little bit about Masimo's evolution. I think about it in sort of phases from a healthcare company initially focused on pulse ox, then more parameters, then solutions, and now consumer. Maybe put that in your own words and talk about how those things are all coming together and what that means for the future of the company.
Sure, Matt. And thank you. And thank you to Jefferies for inviting Masimo to participate in your conference this year. It's our first time here at the Jefferies Healthcare Conference. To answer your question and look back a little bit at the history of Masimo, you should know that we got our start in one of the most important critical care areas of the hospital, which is the NICU, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where our technology could make the largest difference in ensuring good health of neonates, babies who needed to be monitored for low blood oxygen immediately after birth. And with Masimo technology, we brought significant advantages in terms of lower false alarms, higher true alarms, and reducing the workflow for nurses to respond to those false alarms in that setting.
From there, we branched out to other areas of the hospital with the pulse ox technology and went from 0% market share up to a very significant level today where we are the primary provider of pulse oximetry monitoring technology in many of the leading hospitals of the world, and especially in the U.S. Over the last 30 years, we've significantly expanded our portfolio to include other types of monitoring technologies, and we're now able to provide a full suite of products to hospitals for vital signs measurement during surgery and in the intensive care unit.
Layering on top of that now, something you just hinted at, which are hospital automation solutions, automating the information-based processes in the hospital related to data capture, transmission, display, and analysis so that doctors and nurses can be aware at all times of changes in the conditions of the patients and what that might mean for their recovery. Now we're looking at the evolution of the company into a consumer health technology provider that can follow the patient from the hospital into the home setting, and that's where the genesis of our strategy, hospital to home, came from. We have now facilitated the evolution of that with the acquisition of a consumer products company last year, which will give us the channel access and the expertise to promote our products into the home health setting.
What we're envisioning now is data that follows the patient for their entire life, where we're capturing data at all appropriate time points, putting that into the cloud, and providing access to that data for health professionals to make the best possible care decisions for their patients. So Masimo today has really evolved into a much broader company than it started out. And there's still a long runway ahead for us to come out with more innovative products.
Great. Thank you for that comprehensive start. I think it would be helpful maybe to structure this in a way where we unpack each one of those layers a little bit more, and so let's start with where we began with pulse oximetry, so maybe talk a little bit about, A, how that market is growing, how you're gaining share there, and some of the differences between your products and your competitors.
The pulse ox market is our most important market today and our most important product line. It accounts for about 80% of our hospital segment sales or medical healthcare segment sales today. The market itself is not growing very quickly, only at about 3%-4% per year. But as we gain market share, we're growing considerably faster. Our long-term growth expectation is to see that product line inside Masimo grow at 6%-8% per year. So it is a very significant driver of our overall growth. And now we're coming out with form factors for pulse ox monitoring that go beyond the hospital. We have two different products that are suitable for monitoring blood oxygen levels in the home setting. I'm wearing one of those today.
That is our W1 Watch, which has a sensor on the back that measures heart rate, respiration rate, and blood oxygen levels. We also have a disposable wearable for home monitoring known as the Masimo SafetyNet with a specialized version recently launched called the Opioid Halo product. Pulse ox is a very significant opportunity for us. It's a $2.2 billion worldwide market today. Our share is very meaningful in that market. We see a very good runway ahead for building our share steadily over the next five to 10 years.
Great. And one of the things I'd love you to help people understand is that you mentioned in the beginning you kind of started in the NICU and places where pulse ox was really needed for read-through motion and low perfusion. But COVID has been an accelerant of the use of pulse ox in many settings, including on the general floor of the hospital. Could you talk about how pulse ox has expanded to the general floor over the last few years and how you could continue to see that happen?
Yeah, sure. The primary area for deployment traditionally of pulse ox monitoring has been in the critical care area of operating rooms and ICU beds. Now we're seeing more widespread adoption of monitoring in the lower acuity setting known as the general floor, the med-surg floor. Now, in contrast to critical care, where all patients are monitored all the time, in the lower acuity settings, we think the bed coverage with monitors now stands at somewhere between 35% and 40%. So there's still quite a ways to go to get more monitors next to beds. At the same time, not every patient in the general floor setting is being monitored.
We estimate that only about half of those patients are monitored based on the medical appropriateness of those patients being there for either some kind of heart or lung surgery or medical treatment or because they're getting opioid drugs, which could cause respiratory depression, and if their patients are not monitored, they may slip away and die without anybody noticing, so still quite a bit of growth potential there in the general floor setting. There was a big spike up in bed coverage with monitors related to COVID when hospitals were afraid they wouldn't have enough monitored beds to handle a surge of COVID patients. That almost tripled the number of monitored beds, but still, there's another tripling of that coverage possible today.
Great. And so let's move into the other parameters that you've come out with over the last 20 years, things like Rainbow, but also acquiring into areas like capnography, SedLine, O3. Maybe talk. You don't have to hit everyone. There's a lot of them. But maybe talk about some of the highlights there. How are they growing differentially? And how do they add to the value proposition of SET, for example?
Out of those technologies, Rainbow is the most significant one for us. Today, it accounts for slightly over 10% of our healthcare segment sales. We're seeing very good adoption of Rainbow nowadays for guiding blood transfusion decisions during surgery. Using the total hemoglobin reading enabled by Rainbow, a surgeon can know whether a patient has breached the threshold of too low a hemoglobin level due to blood loss during surgery, now requiring a transfusion. We've got a complementary technology to that that's coming out this year, which is cardiac output measurement through an acquisition we made of a company called LiDCO. The combination of cardiac output with total hemoglobin will give surgeons and anesthesiologists the Holy Grail of monitoring measurements they need for guiding fluid management in surgery, which is oxygen delivery.
So we see a lot of synergy up the road here selling those two technologies together, Rainbow with the LiDCO CO measurement. The other technologies you mentioned, which are also contributing to growth for us, are the additional monitoring technologies for the brain. SedLine and O3. SedLine looks at brain function activity. O3 looks at brain oxygen levels specifically. Those products today account for roughly 2%-3% points of healthcare segment sales each. And in aggregate with capnography, the three of those are consistently growing at over 20% per year as we gain market share. So they are important contributors to our growth. I'd say the highlight of the three of them is in our capnography product line. About two years ago, we launched the disposables, the cannula that go with the hardware. And those disposables will connect to any brand of capnography hardware.
And the adoption there has been very, very strong. In fact, the disposables now are just about equivalent in sales contribution to the hardware. So we're seeing very good tag-along sales of those capnography disposables with our pulse oximetry customers because it's such an easy add-on to the order.
Gotcha. And I guess I'd also love for you to cover this concept of a halo effect that having all those other parameters has on the SET business because we know you have a price premium in SET. You talk about not losing many accounts, but maybe only losing once in a while on price. How do those things go hand in hand to help you retain such strong SET share and grow share in that business?
Yeah. It's great for us to have this portfolio where we have so many shots on goal with superior performance in the monitoring technologies. So one product can bring in the others and vice versa. Traditionally, that's been pulse ox, where we have our strongest beachhead bringing in the other monitoring technologies like SedLine and O3. And conveniently for our customers, all of those can connect into our hub device known as Root. Root can accept plug-ins of data streams from all of the different Masimo technologies as well as third-party devices. So once a Root is in place to facilitate one or two measurements, it's very easy to add additional sensors to the package to round out the set so that a hospital winds up using multiple Masimo technologies.
With regard to the portfolio approach, we're able to structure what we call whole-house conversion deals for the hospitals where we can get very creative in pricing the hardware and the sensors to put together these five to seven-year contracts. And that's the kind of success we're achieving out there in gaining more adoption of the technologies.
Gotcha. And maybe bringing up Root and device integration is a good segue to talk more about some of the automation solutions. So could you cover, I guess, what those offer today, some of the key features? And maybe just talk about the materiality of those to the business as well.
Yeah, sure. With hospital automation, it's a pretty nascent effort for the company today. It's a small contributor, but the potential is quite large. We're looking at developing a subscription model for this suite of hardware and software that would be priced anywhere between $1,000 per bed per year up to as much as $5,000 per bed per year. Starting out in the critical care area where you have OR beds and ICU beds, you can see that we could establish a foothold there and then spread to the other areas of the hospital and generate very significant revenues for the company. In fact, the potential exists for us to double the amount of revenues per hospital against what we would be achieving just with sensor sales alone. We've got a number of very advanced software modules to go with the hospital automation package.
One of them is known as UniView, and it consolidates all the data feeds from all the different devices around a patient in surgery onto one screen. That makes it very easy for everybody to know the status of the patient at the same time. We've got another software module known as Replica, which is a remote presence type of software module that replicates the monitor display on a smartphone as well as sends messages and notifications to all the doctors and nurses responsible for the patient. And finally, we've got our most advanced software module known as Halo Index, which tracks the status of the patient from initial monitoring hookup to show if they're improving, deteriorating, or stable. And we can layer advanced decision support analytics onto that.
The first example that we've done there is the sepsis index, where we can flag developing sepsis early, which would enable earlier administration of antibiotics to avoid a catastrophic outcome.
Can you just talk about the materiality of that business today and how it's growing?
Yeah. Hospital automation today accounts for roughly 2%-3% points of our healthcare segment sales. And it's growing in a somewhat lumpy fashion because of the long-term nature of the selling cycle. But the growth rate is in the neighborhood of 20%-40%. So it is a meaningful chunk of the business, and it will become a meaningful contributor to growth over the next few years.
Great, so I wanted to transition and talk a little bit more about your different plays with the consumer, so this started before Sound United with some of your remote monitoring and aspirations there, and then you did the Sound United transaction about a year ago plus, and that's given you some distribution and some additional hooks into a mass market, so maybe cover more of the rationale behind the Sound transaction, why you felt like it was the right time to do that, and then I want to go into some of the products and new offerings as well.
Okay, sure. First, you need to understand the backdrop for the Sound United transaction and our move into the consumer area, specifically for us moving into consumer health and wellness. For the past five plus years, we've been working on developing a product portfolio in the consumer health area where we could leverage our core technologies and get them into use settings such as the home. This way, you could facilitate monitoring and care of patients outside the hospital setting and try to reduce the risk of them getting hospital-acquired infections or having some medical error affect their outcome. We got to the point where these products were nearing the end of the finish line for development, and we're ready to launch them, and that's where Sound United came in. We needed channel access, and we also needed sales, marketing, and promotion expertise.
And those are two of the critical things they brought to the table. Sound United's brands, Bowers & Wilkins, Marantz, Denon, and Polk have a strong worldwide presence in the consumer products area. And we're able to leverage that now to get our trucks onto their highways for faster adoption by consumers. So that's one of the key things they brought. Another key thing was form factors that would allow us to make combination products where we could take their hardware and put our software into it to come up with new products for health-oriented applications. One of the best examples of that will be the Denon PerL earbuds coming out later this month, which will incorporate signal processing technology that will evolve into a next-generation product for over-the-counter hearing aids.
So Sound United really rounded out our strategy by bringing in the assets we needed to maximize the potential of our internal development efforts.
Gotcha. And you mentioned one of the key product launches. Maybe we could cover a few of the other ones that are coming through the consumer channel now, like the Stork Baby Monitoring, the watch that you have on there, and the other one that could come out later this year, and the AAT hearables, to name a few.
Yeah. We've laid the groundwork now for what should be a very successful launch of the Stork Baby Monitor. This will be a baby monitor that includes vital signs monitoring in a very soft silicone bootie. It'll monitor heart rate, respiration rate, and blood oxygen levels. And at the same time, send all that data to an app that will allow the parents to see the status of their baby from anywhere at any time. We're also including a full-color night vision camera with that package for Stork that will have two-way audio capabilities so parents can hear and talk to their baby even when they're not home. You should expect to see that product in some very well-known retail channels. The launch will be coming up over the next one to two months.
We'll also be selling the product through some very significant online retailers, including some well-known baby registries. Stork should get off to a running start. We're thinking that that will really lay the foundation for Masimo's presence and reputation building in the consumer health area. The AAT earbuds you mentioned are products that are targeted just for audio at this point to optimize music listening. That is an earbud that will have the ability to automatically adjust the equalizer settings so that the listening experience is customized to a person's hearing abilities. That way, if they have hearing loss in the high-frequency range from going to too many concerts, they'll still be able to hear the music perfectly. Another product coming out will be the Freedom Watch, which is a second-generation version of this W1 watch that I'm wearing.
The Masimo Freedom will be a full-fledged Android smartwatch. It will have all the vital signs measurement capabilities that the Masimo W1 has, plus the traditional smartwatch features. And that should be coming out in the fourth quarter. These products will greatly benefit from flowing through the Sound United retail channels.
Gotcha. And then on Sound United, I would argue from an investor perspective that the sales have held up better than many would have feared because of the high-end nature of the products. But there's been some challenges with the margins. And so I was hoping you could address those two points. Why have the sales held up better? Do you expect that to continue? And then let's talk about how margins could improve there.
Yeah, sure. Well, the Sound United product portfolio includes four well-known brands. The highest-end ones are Bowers & Wilkins and Marantz. And with speakers that start out in the $5,000 range and full-fledged home entertainment systems that run as much as $30,000, there's a very specific demographic that's being targeted there. And that is a demographic that's held up quite well despite some of the economic turbulence we've already seen. The mid-range brand that Sound United carries is Denon, still considered a premium brand, which has also held up very well. The lowest-end brand they sell is known as Polk. And Polk is a little more vulnerable to economic gyrations, especially with regard to sales cycles for television upgrades and the associated sound bars that go with them. So that's an area where we're putting a little more focus on sustaining growth.
But at this point, the high-end brands are holding up very, very well. With regard to the margins, the margins had been hurt through some of the supply chain problems that we saw last year, especially with regard to spot purchases of certain components, which would not be at the high-volume discount rates, as well as higher-than-usual freight costs. But a lot of those have really come back down again now. So we are expecting to see the margins for that business improve as we move through the year.
Gotcha. One follow-up on that. So in general, when we think about some of these new product offerings, the key offerings like Stork and the hearables and the watches, how do those margins compare to the legacy sound margins?
Initially, the margins should be just a little bit better. We're able to derive premium pricing for premium performance in these specialized markets that are significantly less competitive, especially for the baby monitor. We should expect to see those margins come up gradually to approach levels that are kind of halfway in between what we see for classic audio and our traditional hospital medical products. I'd say stay tuned on that topic. A key driver, of course, will be scale.
We're almost out of time, but maybe I'll just ask you for some thoughts on the current healthcare environment because your sensors are kind of a proxy for utilization in some ways. So maybe you could talk about any trends that you've seen throughout the first part of the year here and how you expect that to continue to evolve as it relates to both your sensor growth, but also your OEM partners and how they can place boxes and help you to pull through more sensors.
Yeah, you're right in saying that our sensor sales are tied to overall census in the hospitals. Our sensors are used with both surgery patients as well as medical treatment patients. And so you can see that hospital traffic is really the key variable there. Hospital traffic now has basically gotten back to trendline growth, as you can see in the hospital reports coming out quarterly. We're looking at census growth in the range of 1%-3% nowadays. So it's made a nice recovery from the levels during COVID when people were postponing a lot of elective surgeries. For us, the key metric to look at for forecasting our growth is the installed base growth. And there, we're tracking very much on trend at about 7%. Some of the OEM monitoring companies had some hiccups with installations over the past 18 months.
But a lot of those have now been addressed. They had supply chain problems themselves. So at this stage, I would say things have gotten largely back to normal.
Great. Well, I think we should end there. But Eli, thanks so much for your time. And thanks, everybody, for your interest in Masimo .
Thanks, Matt.