Hillrom Brand Guidelines: William Hillenbrand’s 1929 Bed Maker, Now Part of Baxter

A furniture idea from a casket town.

Hillrom began as the Hill-Rom Company, founded in 1929 in Batesville, Indiana, by William A. Hillenbrand. Baxter, which owns the business today, gives the same founder, year and state in the history on its own website. Batesville was already a Hillenbrand town: William’s father, John A. Hillenbrand, had taken over the struggling Batesville Casket Company in 1906, and the family’s woodworking businesses grew around it.

A Hillenbrand Industries company history from the mid-1990s, republished by FundingUniverse, says William set out to start a furniture business during the Great Depression and chose the hospital market to set himself apart. According to that history, he spent almost a full year visiting hospitals across the United States to see how furniture in patients’ rooms could be improved, and the result was what the company called the first wood and metal hospital bed, a design that replaced the white tubular steel beds then common in wards. The same account describes cherry, mahogany, oak and walnut as the hardwoods the Hillenbrand companies used.

Hill-Rom grew as a division of the family company. The FundingUniverse history says it prospered through the 1930s and especially after the Second World War, and credits Hill-Rom with introducing an electronically controlled bed in 1950, which the company described as the first. Beds for maternity, for burns units and for intensive care followed, along with infant warmers, stretchers and nurse communication systems.

The parent company, Hillenbrand Industries, went public in 1971, the same history says. In 1985 it bought SSI Medical Services of Charleston, South Carolina, a specialised medical-products and services company, and by 1994 SSI and Hill-Rom were being run together under the Hill-Rom name. For decades the group paired two very different businesses from one Indiana base: caskets under the Batesville name and hospital beds under Hill-Rom.

Beds, lifts and a connected ward.

Hillrom’s range moved well beyond the bed frame. English Wikipedia lists the businesses Hill-Rom added over the years, among them Welch Allyn, the diagnostic-equipment maker it bought in September 2015, as well as Mortara Instrument, Trumpf Medical, Allen Medical and Liko. Hillrom kept the Welch Allyn name on some of its monitoring and diagnostic products. In April 2019 it bought Voalte, a clinical communications business, and in January 2020 Excel Medical Electronics; the surgical-products business Aspen Surgical was sold in 2019.

Beds remained the public face of the brand. Wikipedia says the Centrella smart bed was developed after Hillrom studied patients in 29 hospital units, and that it won the 2017 Stanley Caplan User Centered Design Award. In 2018, Wikipedia adds, Hillrom began fitting beds with EarlySense sensors that sit under the mattress. Baxter’s own history names Progressa, an intensive-care bed platform, among the products that came to market in the 2000s. Today Baxter groups the line as beds and mobility equipment, from smart beds to lifts and transport stretchers.

The name itself changed in 2019, when Hill-Rom rebranded as Hillrom, dropping the hyphen. English Wikipedia says the rebrand was meant to signal a shift from a history of hospital beds and devices towards digital health products and software for connected care. The listed parent was still called Hill-Rom Holdings when Baxter bought it in 2021.

Wikipedia also describes the way Hillrom’s development teams worked, through contextual inquiry and immersion: spending time in clinical settings to understand workflow and the patient’s experience before designing.

How bed makers present themselves.

Hospital bed and patient-handling makers sell to buyers who rarely see the product in a showroom. Purchasing teams, nurses and facilities planners meet it in catalogues, on websites and at trade fairs, so the way these companies present themselves leans heavily on photography, diagrams and film rather than on the object in the hand.

The most common image is the bed in a calm ward: a made-up mattress, soft daylight, a tidy bedside cabinet and very little else in the frame. Cutaway views and close-ups take over in technical literature, showing the frame, the castors, the side rails and the handsets and control panels that staff use every day. Hoists and stand-up aids are usually shown in use, in care homes and bathrooms as well as hospitals, with a carer and a resident in a staged transfer.

Trade fairs are a second stage. Large medical exhibitions such as MEDICA in Düsseldorf and Arab Health in Dubai give makers a stand on which beds, lifts and mattresses can be set out as a working room. Product films extend the same idea, often following a nurse at the bedside through a short routine to show how a control, a rail or a lift is meant to be used.

Behind those images sit long ownership histories. Many of the names in this field began as small workshops or furniture makers and passed through larger medical-technology groups, mergers and listings, so the brand on the bed today often carries decades of earlier companies with it. The guides in this round look at that history alongside the way each maker presents itself.

From Hillenbrand to Baxter.

The business separated from the casket maker in 2008. English Wikipedia says Hill-Rom Holdings was formerly part of Hillenbrand Industries until that company split its medical equipment division from its casket business that year. The medical side continued as Hill-Rom Holdings, with its headquarters given as Chicago, while Batesville Casket stayed with Hillenbrand until it was sold in 2023, Wikipedia says.

Independence lasted thirteen years. In September 2021 Baxter International announced it would buy Hillrom, and the deal was completed in December 2021. HospiMedica reported on 14 December 2021 that Baxter, based in Deerfield, Illinois, had completed its acquisition of Hill-Rom Holdings of Chicago, and that it planned to take legacy Hillrom and Welch Allyn products into new international markets. Hillrom is now a wholly owned part of Baxter, and Baxter lists it among its affiliated brands as a leader in smart beds, surgical equipment and care communications. The old hillrom.com address now forwards to Baxter’s own websites.

Inside Baxter the Hillrom name sits alongside a much older medical history. Baxter’s timeline sets the 1929 founding of Hill-Rom next to its own beginnings and the founding of Welch Allyn in 1915, presenting all three as strands of one company. Baxter has since spun off other businesses, including its kidney-care arm as Vantive in 2025, while keeping the beds, lifts and communications products that came with Hillrom.

For a design guide, Hillrom shows how a maker can trim its own name to look forward while its products stay rooted in the ward. Compare Arjo, the Swedish patient-handling maker, and Baxter, the owner since 2021. For this guide we use a ward navy, a walnut brown and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hillrom’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.