Northwell Health this week announced a new seven-year agreement with Philips designed to standardize patient monitoring technology across its 21 hospitals and 850 outpatient facilities.

WHY IT MATTERS

By taking an enterprise-wide approach to its IT systems, Northwell hopes to enhance patient care and improve patient outcomes while driving interoperability and data innovation, health system officials say.

Philips' patient monitoring platform is vendor-agnostic, enabling use of Northwell's existing network infrastructure, the company says, and uses artificial intelligence to support clinical decisions.

The interoperable, secure architecture can also break down barriers to systems integrations and simplify clinical workflows, said Jeff DiLullo, chief market leader for Philips North America, in Tuesday's announcement. 

"The new Philips system gives us an enterprise-wide platform that centralizes our patient monitoring and allows us to see what is happening at each bedside," added Phyllis McCready, vice president and chief procurement officer for Northwell Health, in a statement.

"The innovative approach is extensible and allows us to give the communities we serve the very latest technology while helping us to deliver a better patient and staff experience and better outcomes."

Northwell Health can also use Philips' software evolution services to evolve its patient monitoring capabilities over time.

THE LARGER TREND

The COVID-19 pandemic pressed the spectrum of healthcare providers, with even the largest healthcare system struggling to treat increased demand. They used parking lots and other nontraditional large spaces to expand treatment spaces, and digital care flourished. 

Across the country, health systems are now using remote patient monitoring platforms to tackle a number of operational challenges they face as they forge ahead in the post-pandemic era. 

The impact of the pandemic revealed that healthcare providers needed patient data to reduce hospitalizations, according to Dr. Zsolt Kulcsar, medical director at Lee Health based in Fort Myers, Florida. 

"We couldn't make data-driven decisions because we didn't have blood pressures, we didn't have oxygenation saturations, we didn't have weights, we didn't have the data that goes with the clinical decision-making."

With RPM implemented in September 2022, Lee Health is able to care for patients with fewer in-patient services – from 17% of remotely monitored patients down to 3-5%, he told Healthcare IT News in January.

To help burned-out employees serve increased patient populations, health systems of all sizes are looking to AI to increase efficacy and better focus care delivery on improved patient outcomes. 

AI, while controversial for clinical decision support, is now widely leveraged to improve a variety of healthcare processes from administration to radiology. The analytics can continuously update patient views and provide insights across clinical workflows, and help coordinate services.

ON THE RECORD

"Their new patient monitoring system can help minimize manual tasks, give staff a centralized view of patients and harness the power of massive amounts of data by using AI to provide actionable clinical insights – all of which are helping them to deliver a better patient and staff experience, lower costs and contribute toward the goal of improving outcomes," said DiLullo about the new Northwell partnership.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

Jennifer Gaudet Hefele will offer more detail in the HIMSS23 session "Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds to Measure Healthcare Quality." It is scheduled for Tuesday, April 18 at 3 p.m. – 4 p.m. CT at the South Building, Level 5, room S505.