Salesforce joins forces with Philips
'How can we make an 80 year-old person with multiple chronic diseases actually start using this technology?'
With sights set on spurring healthcare innovation and interoperability, Royal Philips has teamed up with customer relationship management company salesforce.com to bring a new open, cloud-based platform to the market.
The envisioned platform, officials say, will allow for data integration from myriad sources, including electronic health records, diagnostic imaging equipment and personal mobile devices.
Also integral to the product will be patient relationship management, which should further enable clinicians to collaborate in support of their patients.
The companies' partnership has already yielded two clinical applications to be released late summer, officials say -- the Philips eCareCoordinator, which monitors thousands of patients in real time, and Philips eCareCompanion, which is carried by the patient at home and connects patients to their providers in real time.
In creating these two initial clinical applications, it was about asking some difficult questions far beyond what kind of technology was needed, officials noted. "We said, 'How can we make an 80 year-old person with multiple chronic diseases actually start using this technology? How can we have a nurse at a telehealth center actually managing hundreds of patients at a time?'" said Jeroen Tas, CEO of Philips Healthcare Information Services in a June 26 media roundtable. "This is what we're talking about."
These care collaboration applications should 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, which is currently being piloted at Arizona-based Banner Health, a pioneer accountable care organization. Similar telehealth-based care delivery models for hospitals utilizing the Philips eICU program were shown to reduce mortality by 26 percent and length of stay by 20 percent in a recent large, multi-center study, according to officials.
Officials said these two applications were only the beginning of the partnership between two companies. "We're going to continue to deliver additional patient platform services," said Clarence So, executive vice president of mobile strategy, salesforce.com, at the press roundtable. "Together, we're going to combine our platform services and expose them to APIs through tool kits."
Philips and salesforce.com anticipate the apps will cover the continuum of care: from self-care and prevention, to diagnosis and treatment through recovery and wellness. The envisioned platform, which is based on the Salesforce1 Platform, will ultimately enable collaboration and workflow.
