Showing posts with label Royal Philips. Show all posts

Philips to expand its Population Health Management business with the acquisition of Wellcentive

Amsterdam, the Netherlands 20 July 2016 – Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Wellcentive, a leading US-based provider of population health management software solutions. Financial details of the transaction will not be disclosed.

In population health management, Philips already offers enterprise telehealth, home monitoring, personal emergency response systems (PERS) and personal health services that address multiple groups within a population from intensive ambulatory care for high-risk patients to prevention and personal health programs for the general population. Wellcentive complements Philips’ portfolio with cloud-based IT solutions to import, aggregate and analyze clinical, claims and financial data across hospital and health systems to help care providers deliver coordinated care that meets new healthcare quality requirements and reimbursement models.

Upon completion of the transaction, which is expected later today, Wellcentive and its employees will become part of the Population Health Management business group within Philips. Tom Zajac, CEO of Wellcentive and an experienced healthcare industry leader, will be appointed to lead this business group.

“With this strategic acquisition, we will strengthen our Population Health Management business and its leadership, as health systems gradually shift from volume to value-based care, and provide more preventative and chronic care services outside of the hospital,” said Jeroen Tas, Philips’ CEO Connected Care & Health Informatics. “Our sweet spot is at the point of care as we give consumers, patients, care teams and clinicians the tools, such as remote monitoring solutions and therapy devices, to optimize care. Wellcentive’s solutions will provide our customers with the ability to collect data from large populations, detect patterns, assess risks and then deploy care programs tailored to the needs of specific groups.”

“Over the past 11 years, the Wellcentive team has focused on delivering data-driven clinical, financial, and human outcomes for our customers as they provide care management for more than 30 million patients,” said Tom Zajac, CEO of Wellcentive. “Combining forces with Philips and its broad portfolio of health technologies and global reach will create a great foundation to accelerate growth in connected care – from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care – enabling consumers, providers and health organizations to benefit from our combined, stronger offering in population health management.”

Wellcentive’s applications will be integrated in the Philips HealthSuite cloud, the company’s digital enabler for the next generation of connected health solutions. One example of Philips’ existing care programs for population health management is the Intensive Ambulatory Care (eIAC) program: this combines telehealth technologies and population health management software to help care teams monitor and coach patients at home. It aims to improve patient outcomes, care team efficiency, and prevent patients from entering the hospital, where costs are significantly higher.

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Wellcentive employs approximately 115 employees. The company has a strong customer base in the US.

Philips and UNFPA collaborate to transform lives in Mandera County, Kenya – announce plans to implement Kenya’s second “Community Life Centre”

May 12, 22.17 PM IST || Pocket Press Release

The Community Life Center in Mandera is expected to provide the local area with modern, integrated high quality health services, access to energy, education, employment opportunities, commercial activities, and a secure social activity hub.

Kigali, Rwanda – Royal Philips (NYSE: PGH, AEX: PHIA), in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) today revealed its plans to inaugurate a Community Life Center (CLC) in Mandera, a County in North-Eastern Kenya with one of the world’s highest maternal mortality ratio - 3,795 per 100,000 live births[1]. The project which is supported by the County Government of Mandera is the second of its kind in the world; Philips inaugurated the first CLC in Kiambu County, Kenya in 2014. The CLC will deliver crucial primary healthcare and enhance community development in Mandera. The first phase of the project is expected to be completed this year.

Strengthening Primary Care & Enabling Community Development

The issues facing primary healthcare in Africa are complicated and multifaceted therefore, to create sustainable improvement means addressing a wide range of issues collectively. Issues range from unavailability of qualified healthcare workers to lack of electricity, water and basic healthcare technology. The creation of the CLC concept enabled Philips to realize its vision to drastically improve primary healthcare in Africa by addressing all causes in one solution. Developed by the Philips Africa Innovation Hub, the concept of the CLC is a community driven and integrated approach for strengthening primary healthcare and service facilities that provide community development from a healthcare, lighting and healthy living perspective.

The CLC concept goes beyond healthcare by turning a health facility into a community hub where technology is bundled with an integrated service package and community empowerment interventions. The technology includes solar power (for reliable and clean energy supply), efficient and durable indoor and outdoor LED-lighting (enabling extended opening hours and providing security to patients and staff), healthcare equipment (to enable patient monitoring, diagnosis and triage), laboratory equipment (especially for antenatal care tests), refrigeration (preserving the life span of vaccines), IT-solutions (storage of patient data), water supply and purification (preventing waterborne diseases) and promotion of community entrepreneurism and social enterprise (utilizing new opportunities created by 24/7 lightning, energy and water).

Siddharth Chatterjee, the UNFPA representative to Kenya said, “Our collaboration with Philips on the CLC is a welcome first step. Our collaboration will be more meaningful when we have demonstrated significant improvements in the health outcomes of the 15 Counties in Kenya that suffer from the highest burden of maternal and newborn mortality. We aim to improve these outcomes by transforming their primary healthcare systems. Key elements for the success of our CLC collaboration are innovation, adaptability, scale and sustainability.”

UNFPA has spearheaded the Every Woman Every Child (EWEC) Private Sector Collective Action initiative in Kenya of which Philips is a founding member. This ground-breaking initiative aims to significantly advance maternal new-born health outcomes in 6 counties[2] in Kenya, which contribute close to 50% of all maternal deaths in the country. The CLC in Mandera reflects the EWEC commitment.

Community Life Center, Kiambu

In June 2014, Philips inaugurated the world’s first CLC in Kiambu, Kenya (located at the Githurai Lang’ata Health Center in Kiambu County). The development in Kiambu saw Philips transform a rundown healthcare center into a bustling community hub where families gather, children do their homework (under solar powered lights), commercial activities take place, and where local Government representatives raise awareness and inform locals about relevant health issues.

Within eighteen months of its opening (from June 2014 – December 2015), the center in Kiambu saw the total number of outpatients visiting per month increase from 900 to 4080; the number of children being treated quadrupled from 533 to 2370; first antenatal care patients grew by fifteen fold from 13 to 188 patients each month, while the number of fourth visit antenatal care patients each month grew sixteen fold, from 6 to 94. The maternity wing of the center enables women to deliver their babies in a safe and secure environment and since its inception, 634 babies have been born with an average of 36 babies currently born at the facility each month.

“In support of our EWEC commitment, the CLC in Mandera, will bring quality primary healthcare to a catchment population of about 40,000 women and children,” said JJ van Dongen, CEO Philips Africa. “At Philips our mission is to improve people’s lives through meaningful innovation, the CLC demonstrates an integrated model of healthcare that conjoins technology with services and aims to inspire an entire community to change the way it sees and looks after itself. That’s precisely the kind of innovation that can revolutionize society.”

Technology and capacity building central to the CLC

In Mandera, health workers, community members and other key stakeholders are involved in the entire development process. The CLC will utilize modern healthcare technology and over time is expected to migrate from manual to automated processes and systems, which will be connected to the appropriate Philips local service support organization. Local health workers and community members will be trained and adequately skilled in using this technology, and in turn this will create new education and employment opportunities at local level, thereby improving the livelihood of the community and supporting the sustainability of the CLC.

Ahmed Sheikh, CEC Health, Mandera County said, “We are delighted that Philips and UNFPA have collaborated to develop a CLC in Mandera. This news comes at a time when our region needs it most – we continue to have high incidents of infant and maternal mortality, we have a severe shortage of healthcare facilities and our communities are suffering as a result. This collaboration will have far reaching benefits, and we expect it will enrich the community in Mandera for years to come.”

Philips is rolling out the CLC solution in collaboration with organizations like UNFPA and governments that want to strengthen their community and primary healthcare systems, improving both preventive and curative healthcare as well as social and economic development.

Philips teams up with Validic to integrate personal health data from third-party devices and apps into connected health services

February 3 2016, 19.45 PM IST || Pocket News Alert

Collaboration enables the integration of consumer-generated health data into Philips cloud-based HealthSuite digital platform to power connected health solutions and services

Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Durham, NC – Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG; AEX: PHIA) today announced it is further enabling connected health by signing an agreement with Validic, a U.S.-based fast-growing company that pioneers a technology platform for connectivity and access to digital health data from clinical and remote-monitoring devices, sensors, fitness equipment, wearables and patient wellness applications.

The collaboration with Validic – whose platform reaches approximately 223 million people in 47 countries – will offer Philips opportunities to expand the breadth and depth of its connected health solutions such as its Personal Health Programs, Lifeline medical alert services and eCareCoordinator and eCareCompanion eHealth applications with third-party device data. These connected health solutions and services have been designed to facilitate coordinated care across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis, treatment and home care. They have been built on Philips’ HealthSuite digital platform, an open cloud-based platform of services, capabilities and tools that allows for the creation of the next generation of connected health and wellness innovations.

“Being able to deliver the best care requires that healthcare providers have a comprehensive view of each patient’s health condition,” said Jeroen Tas, CEO, Connected Care and Health Informatics, Philips. “Increasingly, health care is moving beyond the walls of the hospital, enabled by connected devices to monitor both health and care. We can now take a next step by securely combining the data generated by someone’s glucose meter and fitness tracker with their clinical data, so that caregivers can discover relevant and actionable insights for new models of personalized health management of their patients. Our collaboration with Validic helps to accelerate this step.”

The Philips HealthSuite digital platform enables connected health services by utilizing smart devices and mobile apps to help people make more confident health and lifestyle-related decisions. Through its integration capabilities with electronic medical records and other clinical data sources it also supports health systems in the delivery of care coordination solutions. Patients and their care providers are given actionable and longitudinal insight through the combination of clinical and personal health data. The collaboration with Validic will further augment the integration of consumer-generated personal health data from multivendor fitness wearables, remote monitoring devices and health apps, as well as medical devices like blood pressure cuffs, health patches and glucose meters, into existing and new connected health services.

“With a strong presence in both professional health care and consumer health spaces, Philips understands the global impact of people better managing and engaging with their health. They also recognize the industry need for making this remotely collected health data actionable for care providers,” said Ryan Beckland, CEO and co-founder of Validic. “Philips and Validic share a similar vision on connected health and recognize the importance of leveraging digital health data collected outside of the clinical setting to improve the quality of care and patient outcomes.”

The Philips HealthSuite digital platform supports enterprise application development with services specialized for the secure collection of health, wellness and clinical data, allowing for aggregation, analysis and actionable insights. As new digital health technologies rapidly become available, Philips’ customers – both patients and clinicians – will be able to accelerate the adoption of connected health services by utilizing smart devices and mobile apps to make more confident health and lifestyle-related decisions. Philips also offers its HealthSuite digital platform as a scalable and secure Platform-as-a-Service for custom connected health application development and deployment.

For more information on how Philips is connecting care for continuous health with its digital health solutions, visit the Philips booth (#3416) at the HIMSS 2016 Annual Meeting and Exhibition at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas, February 29 – March 4.

Join Jeroen Tas for a Live Webinar on February 19 at 1:00 PM EST on the topic of “Cloud Powering the Connected Health Continuum,” and hear more about the latest developments on connected and integrated healthcare delivery, enabled by Philips’ HealthSuite digital platform.

Philips appoints Jean Botti as Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer

January 29 2016, 13.39 PM IST || Pocket News Alert

Appointment strengthens Philips’ health technology innovation drive

Amsterdam, the Netherlands – Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) today announced the appointment of Jean Botti as Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer as part of the company’s strategy to capture a larger portion of the HealthTech opportunities. Jean Botti, who will join Philips as of April 1, 2016 from Airbus Group (AIR), will become a member of Philips’ Executive Committee and will report directly to Philips CEO Frans van Houten. Jean Botti will succeed Jim Andrew, who left Philips in the fourth quarter of 2015 for personal reasons.

“I am very pleased that Jean Botti has decided to join Philips on our journey to extending our leadership in health technology, capitalizing on opportunities arising from the consumerization and industrialization of healthcare to transform the delivery of care,” said Frans van Houten. “Jean has had a remarkable and distinguished career and his achievements at Airbus are impressive, ranging from his ability to continually improve the company’s innovation capabilities and building intelligent systems, to embedding quality across the company’s value chain. His track record in driving innovation and change in high-tech industries will prove extremely valuable for Philips.”

Jean Botti (French, 1957) joins Philips from Airbus Group, a global leader in aeronautics, space and related services, where he served as Chief Technical Officer since 2006. Prior to this, he worked in various roles in Europe and the U.S. at among others Renault and General Motors. He graduated from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Toulouse in 1986, with a degree in mechanical engineering. He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in collaboration with the University of Michigan. Jean Botti also earned an MBA from Central Michigan University and a degree in Research and Development Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

”I am excited to join a company that has made it its mission to improve the lives of billions of people every year globally and that has such a strong track record in innovation, advanced technologies and design capabilities,” said Jean Botti. “I am convinced that my experience in the automotive and aviation industries in terms of digital transformation and process optimization will support Philips’ ambitions to drive the personalization and industrialization of care.”

The appointment of Jean Botti is the latest example of Philips’ efforts to align its organization in order to better capitalize on HealthTech market opportunities:

Recently, and in addition to his role as CEO of Personal Health, Philips appointed Pieter Nota to the newly-created position of Chief Marketing Officer, whose role is to establish an integrated approach to marketing, building out Philips’ capabilities to drive marketing excellence in the rapidly changing world of health technology.

Furthermore, Philips established the Monitoring, Informatics & Connected Care segment, led by Jeroen Tas and comprising Patient Care & Monitoring Solutions, Healthcare Informatics, Emerging Businesses and a newly created Population Health Management business.