Philips, Salesforce.com Form Alliance To Connect Medical Equipment, Apps To The Cloud
By Jof Enriquez,
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Dutch electronics company Royal Philips and customer relationship management firm Salesforce.com announced a joint effort to build a cloud-based platform to store clinical data from medical equipment, hospital information systems, and remote monitoring apps used by patients with chronic diseases.
The two companies said that this initiative will enable “health care software developers, producers of medical devices, health care providers, and insurance companies” to link to the health cloud, according to The New York Times.
Salesforce.com, a pioneer of cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, will build the HIPAA-compliant platform itself. The companies said that they will launch two complementary apps this summer for their cloud-based software platform system, where providers and patients can connect with each other remotely, according to Reuters.
“If you think of a COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] patient, and how they need to track their blood and health stats, they can monitor from their home using Philips devices and dynamically update through the eCare Companion application,” Fergus Griffin, Salesforce.com’s SVP of solutions and product marketing, explained in an article in Information Week. “This information is connected to the eCare Coordinator app, so the provider knows how the patient is doing in real time, and, based on that, nurses, doctors, and specialists can decide whether they need to see the patient.”
Griffin also said that the ecosystem will be open to medical device and software developers who are interested in building mobile and sensor-based apps.
Philips CEO Frans van Houten told Reuters that the partnership will initially focus on chronic patient care since “seventy-five percent of healthcare costs spent in the U.S. are spent on chronic diseases,” and that the system will make it easier to monitor and engage these patients. Managing chronic ailments such as asthma, COPD, and diabetes could likewise lessen the likelihood of hospital readmissions and bring down healthcare costs.
Philips said that over the long haul, the platform will pull data not only from their scanners, monitoring equipment, and other devices commonly used in hospitals, but also from newer consumer wearable devices with built-in health sensors.
The clinical focus of the project may seem to differentiate it from similar digital healthcare platforms announced recently. But in a Venture Beat report, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that his company's system could eventually connect with Apple’s HealthKit, Samsung’s SAMI, and Google Fit, which are more consumer-oriented in their present iterations.
Image credit: Royal Philips