Alliance Established to Provide Cloud-Based Healthcare Information Technology Platform

A strategic alliance has been established to offer an open, cloud-based healthcare platform. The new technology will enable medical device and data interoperability—the collection of data and subsequent analysis to enhance clinical decision making by professionals and enabling patients to take a more active role in managing their health.

The collaboration will utilize Philip Healthcare’s (Best, The Netherlands) medical technology, clinical applications and clinical informatics expertise and salesforce.com’s (San Francisco, CA, USA) enterprise cloud computing and customer engagement expertise. Patient relationship management will be the focus of the envisioned platform, allowing caregivers to collaborate closely in support of their patients.

The collaboration has already resulted in two clinical applications (apps) to be launched on the new platform later in 2014 and Philips eCareCoordinator and eCareCompanion. These collaboration applications will allow the care team to monitor patients with chronic conditions in their homes and will facilitate Philips’ Hospital to Home clinical programs, such as Banner iCare, being piloted at Banner Health (Phoenix, AZ, USA), an accountable care organization. Similar telehealth-based care delivery models for hospitals utilizing the Philips eICU program were shown to reduce mortality by 26% and length of stay by 20% in a recent large, multicenter study.

“With this strategic alliance, Philips is making great strides to deliver real-time, digital healthcare solutions,” said Frans van Houten, chief executive officer of Royal Philips. “Healthcare data exists in many different forms and in many different systems today. Together with salesforce.com, we have a tremendous opportunity to reshape and optimize the way healthcare is delivered and provide better access to data across the continuum of care.”

“We have entered a new transformative era for healthcare and technology is enabling the industry to connect to, care for and engage with patients and each other in a profound new way,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Together with Philips, we are creating an open health platform and ecosystem to benefit everyone that cares about one of the most important issues of our time.”

Philips and salesforce.com envision that apps will cover self-care and prevention, to diagnosis and treatment through recovery and wellness. The envisioned platform, based on the Salesforce platform (not yet available for sale; 510[k] pending in the United States), will enable collaboration and workflow, as well as integration of data from multiple sources worldwide, including electronic medical records, diagnostic and treatment information obtained through Philips’ imaging equipment, monitoring equipment, personal devices and technologies like Apple’s HealthKit.

Moreover, the cloud-based platform is designed to be highly scalable with built-in privacy and data security. By combining the data, the platform will allow for analysis that will optimize decision making by professionals and engage patients. Both Philips and salesforce.com foresee that the platform, will utilize Philips’ clinical data stores and medical device interoperability. It is intended to be open to developers and is expected to result in an energetic ecosystem of partners creating applications. As a result, the platform should have the potential to transform both professional healthcare delivery and continuous personal health management.

Related Links:
Philip Healthcare
salesforce.com