Maynard “Mike” Ramsey III, M.D., Ph.D.

Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Cardio Command, Inc.
Founder and CEO, Ramsey Medical, Inc.

30 U.S. Patents

Maynard “Mike” Ramsey III is a pioneering physician, biomedical engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur whose work has transformed vital signs monitoring and medical instrumentation. For more than five decades, he has developed medical devices in Florida that have improved patient care in hospitals, physician offices, surgical suites, emergency settings, and home health environments as well as in veterinary medicine. He is best known for inventing and commercializing foundational technologies in automatic blood pressure monitoring, including U.S. Patent No. 4,349,034, widely regarded as a grandfather patent for the automatic non-invasive blood pressure monitor.

Ramsey founded Applied Medical Research, Inc. in Tampa in 1969 to develop and market invasive and noninvasive blood pressure measurement technologies. There, starting in 1975 after earning his MD and PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, he developed the Device for Indirect Noninvasive Automatic Mean Arterial Pressure…the DINAMAP, which was the first microprocessor-based medical monitor. The technology became a standard of care in hospitals worldwide, enabling clinicians to continuously and reliably monitor blood pressure during routine care, surgery, and critical medical events both in human and veterinary medicine. His work helped make automated vital signs monitoring practical at the bedside and contributed to a major shift in how patient data is gathered and used in modern medicine.

In 1979, Johnson & Johnson acquired Applied Medical Research and formed Critikon, Inc. around Ramsey’s technology in Tampa, and two other JNJ companies. As Vice President of Research and Development, and later Vice President of Science and Technology, Ramsey continued to advance multiple generations of DINAMAP patient monitors and helped expand the company’s product line into pulse oximetry, oxygen monitoring, cerebral function monitoring, electrocardiogram-integrated blood pressure systems, and bedside data management systems for hospital acute care nursing units. These innovations helped improve the speed, consistency, and accuracy of patient monitoring while supporting clinical decision-making in high-stakes environments.

Ramsey holds 30 U.S. patents across medical monitoring, pressure sensing, blood pressure cuffs, cardiac devices, medical workstations, hemorrhage control technologies, and related systems. Ramsey has continued to develop technologies for trans-esophageal atrial pacing through the Tampa-based company, CardioCommand, Inc., at which he has worked since his retirement from JNJ. He has also developed a series of portable, handheld, monitoring devices, including statMAP for human use and the petMAP series for veterinary medicine through his company Ramsey Medical, Inc. Most recently he has invented and developed “QuickCuff”, a new type of blood pressure cuff that is applied to the subject without the need for traditional wrapping with Velcro securement, and which can be easily applied to both cylindrical and tapered limbs of human and veterinary subjects. 

In recognition of his contributions to medical technology, Ramsey received the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation Lauffman-Greatbatch Prize and the Society for Technology in Anesthesia J.S. Gravenstein Award for lifetime achievement in technology in anesthesia. He was also a founding member and section author for the AAMI standard on automated noninvasive blood pressure monitors, helping guide the design and validation of the very field his inventions helped create.

Ramsey earned his Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Emory University and both his M.D. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University. Early in his career in Tampa, he served as Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of South Florida and as Director of the Hillsborough County American Heart Association. Through his inventions, companies, standards work, and decades of medical device development in Tampa, Ramsey has left an enduring legacy in patient monitoring and biomedical innovation.