When Philips was in the planning stages for our digital platform HealthSuite, we also were in the midst of a dual transformation.
One transformation was from a conglomerate of multiple industries – consumer electronics, health care and lighting – into a health technology company that is focused on every phase of the health continuum. We wanted to help our customers, direct consumers, care provider organizations and governments span the continuum from healthy living to professional health care and back to healthy living again. We needed to go beyond providing point-to-point offerings and devices, which answer one particular problem without regard to others, to having complete and fully integrated solutions.
BUILDING ON THE CLOUD
The second transformation involved the growing availability of cloud technology and the advantages it provides in terms of storage, computing power and connectivity. Cloud storage is always on, and it scales up and down to meet your needs.
The cloud offering is transforming many industries in an impactful way, as you no longer need to purchase upfront all of the computing power that you might need for the next few years. That allows for both peaks and flows in your demand. But it also enables new business models and innovation because you can launch initiatives very quickly, test them out and go forward with what works.
When our business transition combined with the growing cloud trend, our path to this great new world of business platforms became clear. The HealthSuite digital platform is the result.
HUMAN ADVANTAGES
Philips has a unique advantage. We have a global footprint and our solutions span the entire continuum of care, from the consumer domain into the professional domain. For example, we have a very strong consumer brand with our Philips Avent uGrow smart baby monitor that collects data and sends it to the Philips uGrow parenting platform to analyze. This information enables the consumer to optimize an infant’s environment and then share any pertinent data with care professionals.
But we also have a very strong business-to-business professional healthcare brand -- our ultrasound equipment, for example -- which reaches into obstetrics in the hospital segment. This means that we can connect information about the expectant mother’s prenatal care to the delivery and then through the months following that delivery.
Our platform has the power to enable a lot of very compelling propositions. We offer a solution that connects the patient with the caregiver to give them a deeper understanding of the patient’s health, and through predictive analytics the solution will alert the patient at an early stage if their health is declining. Ultimately, it allows Philips to deliver a rich experience to both the end consumer and the professional caregiver, who is focused not only on the mother and the baby, but the baby’s entire family as well.
DATA MANAGED TO BENEFIT ALL
In health care, data ownership is an area of particular concern. As a platform provider, we must protect and manage the rights of each entity. When we are working with a hospital system, for instance, the hospital owns the data, but the patients have specified what rights the hospital has to use their data, and Philips must honor both sets of rights. In the consumer domain the challenge is much easier; typically, the consumer owns that data.
As a result, we have created what we call a “data framework” where we can combine data from multiple sources, but manage each piece in accordance with the data governance and consent policies imposed by that data’s owner. By aggregating and anonymizing the data, however, our platform enables users to find patterns and gain insights into larger challenges in care delivery across entire populations, for the benefit of all. ◆
Dale Wiggins is vice president and general manager of the Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform. He joined Philips in 2001 from Hewlett- Packard/Agilent Technologies where he held various management, architecture and engineering positions in research and development. He is based in Boston.PROFILE
