Philips, the Dutch healthcare and lighting company, announced on Thursday it would be partnering with Salesforce to build a cloud-based platform that will connect healthcare providers, insurers and healthcare consumers.
Philips has built two applications on the platform, eCareCoordinator and eCareCompanion that will become available in the summer. The former will present the most relevant patient data to the clinician, flag problems and provide comms links to other healthcare professionals and the patient, while the latter is designed as a tablet app for patients to log information about their health and keeps track of health data from connected devices like blood pressure monitors, smart watches and scales.
“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.”
Although companies like Apple, Google and Samsung have tried to make headway in the healthcare industry, their efforts have been geared towards wearable devices containing consumer health data. What Philips and Salesforce have announced is much broader than this; the new partnership is focussed on collecting clinical data too. The aim, Benioff claimed, is to “eliminate boundaries between hospital and homes and enable collaboration between patients and doctors.”
The initial focus of the partnership will be on “at-risk” patients, which include seniors and those with chronic illnesses. The two companies will sell the aforementioned technologies to healthcare organizations (like Banner Health) to manage chronic ailments more efficiently, which account for 7 of every 10 deaths, and for 75 percent of healthcare costs in America.
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(Image Credit: Flickr)
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