Philips, Salesforce.com to create clinical, cloud-based platform

Royal Philips and Salesforce.com are partnering to build a cloud-based platform to advance clinical information sharing and patient engagement. The expectation is that Philips ($PHG) brings to the table its clinical strength with its established medical device, imaging and monitoring presence, while Salesforce.com will contribute its cloud-computing software experience.

The partners have already created a pair of clinical applications that they expect to launch on the platform later this summer. Both are designed specifically for care collaboration for patients at home with chronic conditions and only took six months to build. The applications are part of Philips' Hospital to Home program, which is being piloted at Arizona accountable-healthcare organization Banner Health.

The partners said they will not restrict application development to particular devices or developers, but did not disclose any financial details of the deal.

The idea is to connect patients, doctors and other caregivers. The platform will enable medical device and data interoperability to allow the collection of data and subsequent analysis that can help in clinical decision-making and patient engagement.

Jeroen Tas

"We are going back to the one-on-one relationship, where people knew you. But now we're doing it on a scale of one hundred million. That's where I believe the big opportunity is," Jeroen Tas, CEO of Philips Healthcare Informatics Solutions and Services, said on a webcast about the new partnership.

Philips has a wide reach in terms of existing contact with patients and care providers with a significant presence in home health monitoring, imaging systems, diagnostics and clinical informatics. In 2013, 190 million patients worldwide were monitored on Philips monitors, with another 40 million babies on Philips fetal monitors. The company has stored data from over 390 million imaging studies, comprising 10 petabytes of data. Philips devices monitor over two million people in intensive care and about one million patients at home.

"We are already a big data company," noted Royal Philips CEO Frans van Houten.

He added: "We think that in the future patient relationship management in real-time will be at the center of delivering healthcare. And that is going to be supported by our joint envisioned platform, a platform that will allow caregivers to communicate and collaborate efficiently and effectively and to deliver healthcare at a lower cost."

Prior to this partnership, Philips was a Salesforce.com customer for more than three years.

- here is the press release on the deal

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