Philips and Salesforce.com Join Forces for TeleHealth Platform

A cloud-based platform that will allow doctors to monitor the health of a patient outside a medical care facility will be launched this summer in the U.S.

The new platform, a work of collaboration between Philips the Dutch electronics behemoth and Salesforce.com the U.S. based cloud provider, will help medical care providers to track the vital signs of a patient and check if they are maintaining their treatment regime.

The system is able to work by collecting different data across dedicated apps where the patient logs general information that is health related and from the wearable devices and sensors monitoring their vital signs.

The data is then fed to a service that is running on the Salesforce1 Platform that analyses it and sends back useful data to the patients and the doctors to help with guiding treatment.

The data is then filtered so that doctors see the information that is most relevant to the patient’s condition that is currently being treated.

Any data that might suggest a problem with the patient’s health that would need urgent attention is flagged to the doctor, who can use the built in platform comms links to get in touch with a colleague, the actual patient or a family member of the patient in an attempt to resolve the problem.

Philips CEO of information services Jeroen Tas during a demo spoke of how the new system is able to spot that an older patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease missed some medication and detect that her bloodstream had low levels of oxygen.

Those issues were then sent to a nurse and the patient. The nurse could then notify a colleague and send a message to the daughter of the patient.

Philips currently builds a number of monitors that are healthcare related and work with the new system. The system will be designed in a manner that will work with healthcare monitoring by a third party as well as a wearable device.

Philips has designed two apps thus far on this platform, eCareCompanion and eCareCoordinator.

The eCareCoordinator is software designed to send relevant information about the patient to their clinician, to flag any problems and provided comms links to connect with other healthcare providers.

eCareCompanion is an app for a tablet where patients are able to log information about their current health and keeps track of that health data from the connected devices, like monitors for blood pressure and scales.