PaceMate Promotes Chief Commercial Officer to the Top Job

There’s a new (familiar) leader in charge at PaceMate.

The company has appointed Chief Commercial Officer J.R. Finkelmeier as CEO, succeeding founding chief executive Tripp Higgins, who is now board chairman. Finkelmeier joined the company in 2024 after leading Philips’ ambulatory monitoring division for many years. As CEO, he will lead the company through operational transformation to support commercial expansion plans.

Since its founding 10 years ago, PaceMate has achieved widespread adoption by healthcare providers like Duke Health, University of California Health, Banner Health, Ascension and others. In 2024, PaceMate acquired Medtronic’s Paceart Optima System, adding nearly 1,000 more clinic locations and becoming the only company that can fully convert and transfer in-person and historical Paceart patient data. Now, with more than 2 million patients under management, and more health systems wishing to migrate legacy monitoring systems to the cloud, PaceMate is focused on pairing a decade of product innovation with the operational scale needed to meet modern cardiac care’s growing demands.  

“I’m honored to take on this role and continue building on the strong foundation Tripp has created,” Finkelmeier said. “PaceMate realized before anyone else that, with complex cardiac data spread across disparate systems, data gathering is at odds with delivering the best patient care. The company spent a decade building the ideal platform to solve this challenge. PaceMate’s original mission to improve outcomes through real-time cardiac monitoring is more vital now than ever.  I look forward to leading the company forward as it delivers connected cardiac care to more providers and patients around the world.”

Before he joined PaceMate, Finkelmeier was business leader of ECG Solutions at Philips—a multi-hundred-million-dollar global business unit formerly known as BioTelemetry, which Philips acquired for $2.8 billion in 2021. There, he led a team of more than 1,000 supporting remote cardiac monitoring for over 2 million patients annually. Finkelmeier’s leadership included spearheading the acquisition and integration of medical-grade AI innovator Cardiologs and driving operational and commercial transformation across multiple markets.

A strategic operator with deep product, commercial, and clinical insight, Finkelmeier has built a career focused on delivering scalable solutions that improve outcomes and simplify complex care delivery. At PaceMate, he continues this mission by expanding access to real-time, cloud-based cardiac monitoring that enables clinicians to deliver faster, more informed care.

It’s against this backdrop that Finkelmeier sets out to significantly expand PaceMate’s operational readiness to scale delivery across a fast-growing customer base. Among his immediate priorities are meeting demand for the company’s core platform, PaceMateLIVE, and continued investment in the company’s artificial intellligence (AI)-tech-enabled clinical capabilities and certified cardiac expertise. 

“From the beginning, our goal has been to build a platform that eliminates the unnecessary challenges created by traditional remote monitoring approaches, so clinicians can provide their patients with the best care possible,” Higgins stated. “We translated the real-world problems that care teams face into a platform that significantly streamlines their workflows, expedites time to clinical care and intelligently prioritizes patients. Now, J.R. brings the growth expertise necessary to take PaceMate to the next level, ensuring that our platform reaches its full potential.”

PaceMate was founded in 2015 by Higgins, Jason Hale, Noemi Ray, and Gabe Rosu, who noticed the challenges clinicians faced in managing the overwhelming volume and complexity of cardiac data. In response, they built a comprehensive end-to-end remote cardiac monitoring platform. That founding team remains fully in place today.  

Since its founding, PaceMate’s innovation roadmap has been shaped by the clinicians and care teams who directly rely on it. Thus, the platform is uniquely designed to meet the real-world workflows and clinical demands of cardiac care.

PaceMate is the always-on cardiac remote monitoring and AI-enabled, intelligent data management platform that automates workflows, prioritizes critical patients, and delivers better and faster care. The Sarasota, Fla.-based company’s cloud-based system enables care teams to manage cardiac device patients through a single, end-to-end platform that integrates with every major EHR and device vendor. With up-to-date, comprehensive data, PaceMate delivers actionable insights for providers to optimize practice performance and drive better patient outcomes. PaceMate is helping integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and academic health systems, including Duke Health, University of California Health, Ascension, and Banner Health, modernize and scale cardiac care delivery.