Philips and Salesforce partner on healthcare

Partnerships are becoming one of the key drivers behind a growing number of the most practical implementations of cloud services, and they are getting bigger. One of the biggest so far, between Philips and Saleforce, has just been announced .

The healthcare division of Philips, Royal Philips, has joined together with Salesforce to create an open, cloud-based healthcare platform. Patient relationship management will be at the centre of the envisioned platform, allowing care-givers to collaborate closely in support of their patients.

The platform 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 personal health.

The collaboration has already resulted in two clinical applications to be launched on the new platform later this summer, Philips eCareCoordinator and Philips eCareCompanion. These care collaboration applications will allow care teams to monitor patients with chronic conditions in their homes and will facilitate Philips’ Hospital to Home clinical programmes, such as the Banner iCare service being piloted at Banner Health in Arizona.

Similar telehealth-based care delivery models for hospitals utilising the Philips eICU programme have been shown to reduce mortality by 26 percent and length of stay by 20 percent in a recent large, multi-centre 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 optimise the way healthcare is delivered and provide better access to data across the continuum of care.”

According to Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff,the partnership marks the start of 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. The plan is therefore to create an open health platform and ecosystem to benefit everyone that cares about what he sees as one of the most important issues of our time.

Philips and salesforce envision that apps will cover the continuum of care: from self-care and prevention, to diagnosis and treatment through recovery and wellness. It will be based on the Salesforce1 Platform, and 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 enhance decision making by professionals and engage patients.

Both Philips and Salesforce 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 a vibrant ecosystem of partners creating applications. As a result, the envisioned platform has the potential to transform both professional healthcare delivery and continuous personal health management.