About Me:
The "why" behind every patent I've ever filed
Most people in MedTech can point to a spreadsheet that explains their career. I can point to a person.
Her name was Saskia — my sister. Our family called her "Zassi", phonetically.
I grew up selling into the ICU, designing feeding systems for the sickest patients in critical care. I knew those units by their sounds and rhythms long before most people my age knew what an ICU was. Then the unthinkable happened: I had to watch "Zassi" become a user of the very medical systems I'd spent my life building, moving through the ICU, to step-down, to home care, and finally to hospice.
That journey changed me. I saw every gap, every failed handoff, every moment a family is left holding complexity no family should carry alone. I saw what my own industry gets right and where it still breaks people's hearts.
I'm not a regular CEO or Advisor. I'm one driven by a promise and patient care.
Zassi Companies— a promise made tangible
Zassi Companies carry her name. It was founded in honor of my sister, and of every patient and family I met along the continuum from ICU to home.
It's where I invented the world's first bowel / fecal management system and first launched it in 2003 as the first such system in the world.
The system was for the sickest patients in critical care, whose suffering is quiet, undignified, and rarely talked about in pitch decks. The result of this technology was fewer infections, restored dignity, hours of nursing time returned to patients, and an entirely new standard of care now practiced in thousands of hospitals worldwide. There was NO FDA regulatory predicate and so I had to be very innovative. See it being published in prestigious medical journals here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18395989/
Zassi proved the lesson I carry into every project:
innovation is never abstract. There is always a "Zassi" to keep in mind.
Why I still answer the phone at all hours
Because innovation doesn't wait, and neither do patients or the families beside them from ICU to home.
If your technology can save a life, restore quality of life, or open a market that doesn't yet exist, I want to help you get it there. Somewhere out there is another family, waiting.
Let's not keep them waiting any longer.
— Peter M. Von Dyck
