Martin Burns Takes the TEDxUCLA Stage to Sound the Alarm on Preventable Patient Harm.
Bruin Biometrics CEO delivered “What’s Preventing Prevention?” at TEDxUCLA. A talk that puts pressure injuries, the healthcare system’s most overlooked never event, firmly in the public eye.
On 26 May 2026, Bruin Biometrics CEO Martin Burns joined the TEDxUCLA stage to deliver “What’s Preventing Prevention?”. A talk that opens with his own story of growing up amid conflict in Liberia and Northern Ireland, and arrives at a direct challenge to every clinician, hospital administrator, and policymaker in the room.
The talk confronts a sobering reality: according to Johns Hopkins, healthcare is the third leading cause of death in the United States, with a quarter of a million people dying from preventable medical errors every year. Among these, pressure injuries kill 50% more Americans annually than car accidents, yet they remain almost entirely invisible to public awareness. They are classified alongside wrong-limb amputation as a “never event,” and they are the only one on that list still growing.
“No patient should suffer harm that we have the power to prevent.”
At the centre of Martin’s talk is the Provizio® SEM Scanner, using sub-epidermal moisture (SEM) measurement first developed at UCLA. He draws a direct parallel to the introduction of pulse oximetry in the 1980s, which replaced visual guessing at blood oxygen levels and transformed patient safety overnight.
The clinical results speak for themselves – leading US health systems including the Veterans Administration, Boston Medical Center, and the Universities of Maryland and Illinois Chicago are now experiencing the impact of using the technology. Most powerfully, Martin shares the story of Gillian, a senior nurse at a UK hospice chain whose team reached a 100% reduction in broken-skin ulcers in end-of-life patients by year three, a group previously assumed to be beyond protection.
The talk also makes a critical equity argument: current visual assessment methods are significantly less reliable on patients with darker skin tones, contributing to a mortality rate four times higher for this population. Because the Provizio SEM Scanner measures a biological signal beneath the skin, it removes this bias entirely from clinical decision-making.
“When you change what people can see, you change what they do.
And when you change what they do, we build a safer world.”
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