Healthcare without bounds:
The future of health
Healthcare is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, it is rich with innovation, brilliant clinicians, world-class research, cutting-edge technology, and sophisticated health systems that provide care for some of the most challenging conditions and procedures. On the other hand, complexity in the financing, regulation and delivery of care counteracts these considerable strengths to some degree. At every turn, there seem to be barriers to providing patients with personalized, efficient care, creating burdens for both patients and care providers – and adding costs without adding value.
Talk to us about breaking boundaries
In the face of these challenges, it’s encouraging to look at the great progress being made to break down these barriers. Like a hospital system that is providing daily care to patients with chronic conditions in the comfort of their own homes, while reducing costs and utilization. Or a leading healthcare system using predictive care management tools for ICU patients to reduce hospital stays and readmissions, while addressing the critical care shortage and saving millions in costs. And a cardiovascular center treating high-risk cases with less invasive, image-guided technologies that can reduce the length of stay and improve patients’ overall quality of life. Or a research hospital on a mission to create an entirely digital database of tissue samples that will allow pathologists to gain greater insight, facilitating individualized care and optimized treatments. Philips knows these stories because we've been there, working collaboratively with these health systems to break down the boundaries, remove complexity and deliver on a more seamless approach to healthcare when, where and how people need it the most. Innovation. Transformation. Collaboration. That’s what inspires these health systems to partner with us. Industry-leading technologies coupled with an approach that forges new paths in care delivery. A relentless pursuit to make life better. A vision of more seamless care that breaks down boundaries and reduces complexity. This is what drives us. This is Philips.
Removing barriers with enduring partnerships
While we have a deep understanding of the challenges that affect the overall performance of our healthcare system, we see numerous opportunities to make it better. This, however, is not a road traveled alone. It requires deep and trusted partnerships grounded in collaboration, sharing both rewards and risks. Our customers have made it clear that, as the complexity of healthcare gets more intense, working with the overwhelming web of disparate vendors and solutions is no longer a viable option. We couldn’t agree more. At Philips, partnership is far more than a word or a signature on a purchase order. To us, true partnership means rolling up our sleeves and working side-by-side with our customers to identify and implement meaningful solutions customized to each organization’s individual needs and challenges. It requires moving from a transactional to a transformational relationship where we together tackle the toughest challenges specific to each customer. While each of our alliances is as individual as the needs of our customers, they all focus on implementing meaningful innovations, centered on patients and care providers, designed to break down barriers and complexity and to offer better value to patients, providers and the overall healthcare system. We start with a careful assessment of our customer’s existing capabilities and needs, then create a strategic roadmap that will prepare them for the future. We believe our approach to partnership truly sets us apart within our industry.
“…the relationship we have with our customers is fundamentally changing… We want to partner with you in thinking about how to improve people’s lives further. We want to share with you our expertise in health and well-being, technology, information systems and business processes – and, more and more, we will be judged by the results that you achieve.”
Frans van Houten
CEO, Royal Philips
We understand that achieving more seamless care is hindered by the friction and barriers that interoperability can pose in care delivery. As such, we take a vendor-agnostic approach with our open-source platforms and our willingness to work with technology from other vendors. While our commitment to product innovation and R&D investment is greater than ever, we're also partnering to drive process innovation. Our Healthcare Transformation Services consulting team works closely with customers to achieve meaningful and sustainable operational and clinical improvements as well as to design patient-focused environments, which has led to numerous enhancements, from emergency departments to cath labs to entirely new patient care centers. A critical underpinning of our partnerships is our commitment to responsive service. In many cases, we embed clinical, service and technical resources into our client's organization for success. We jointly develop Key Performance Indicators to measure our progress on meeting their most critical challenges. That approach has helped our imaging, cardiovascular and monitoring systems rank #1 in numerous service performance measures in recent years.
The transformation has begun
We are driven to cut through complexity to improve productivity and organize care seamlessly around people – both patients and care providers. While there are many challenges to address, we prioritize four areas of opportunity: simplifying data and insight gathering, driving improved treatment and outcomes, removing excess costs from the system wherever possible, and giving patients and staff a better experience. It's a tall order, for sure, but one we are both capable and committed to addressing. Our integrated portfolio of products and solutions, coupled with our hands-on consultative approach and award-winning service, are helping our clients make strides in all of these areas today. For example, in high-demand areas for nursing care, we’ve developed automated tools that provide a comprehensive view of the patient’s condition while simplifying medical documentation and better utilizing staff resources. The IntelliVue Guardian with Early Warning System (EWS) solution encompasses innovative technology along with our supplementary clinical services that can help guide adoption with change management planning, execution, staff education, and post-implementation support. To help providers work toward providing the right care at the right time in the right place, we’ve created a host of new solutions that reduce redundancies and allow them to diagnose faster and less invasively. Technology such as the IQon Spectral CT can help clinicians characterize a liver lesion through improved visualization, and the anatomically intelligent 3D modeling technology of HeartModel makes cardiac ultrasound exams easier to perform and reduces variability by delivering critical information in seconds. Above all, we remain laser-focused on creating solutions that put patients first. Today’s health consumers are more empowered and demanding than ever before – and rightfully so. They're paying a far greater percentage of their healthcare costs out of their own pockets. They deserve a more comfortable and satisfying experience, like that of our Ambient Experience In-Bore MRI Suite. With the Ambient Experience In-Bore Connect solution, patients were significantly more satisfied with their MRI examinations.
Doing more, together
The vision of seamless care will become even more critical as the healthcare industry shifts more of its focus away from sick care to prevention and healthy living. Philips is using its unique position as a long-established innovator focused on serving customer needs with many ‘first of its kind’ solutions, to bring together people, technology and departments into a more seamless workflow across the care continuum. Our aim with seamless care is to break down boundaries, deliver meaningful innovation, and realize our vision of improving the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2025. We’re excited about contributing to a better future with groundbreaking innovations such as our first digital pathology solution, which will accelerate clinicians’ ability to detect and treat diseases like cancer. We're also developing and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies with the goal to enable earlier treatments customized for each patient – care that is predictive, integrated and precise. To move toward seamless care, together we must continue to break down the barriers between departments and specialists, create breakthrough innovations, eliminate the obstacles separating patients and caregivers, and cross the boundaries that exist between healthcare settings and people’s homes. Because today, health knows no bounds.
We would welcome the opportunity to discuss how we are breaking down barriers in healthcare and discuss how Philips can help your health system do more with less.
The right care at the right time in the right place. That’s healthcare without bounds.
In the hospital.... Allowing all care team members to view the patient’s history from diagnosis through treatment, fostering collaboration, and avoiding unnecessary and repetitive tests is critical to providing seamless care. With the IntelliSpace Portal, one leading US hospital was able to lower its analysis time by over 20%.
In the home.... Helping predict which people in a frail elderly population will need emergency transport in the next 30 days and connecting them with early, cost-effective interventions can help reduce readmissions and ED visits. Early results from a Partners Connected Health study about the predictive analytics of CareSage, paired with Philips Lifeline and other connected technology, indicate the potential to reduce 180-day readmissions by as much as 40%.
Across populations.... Mapping billions of data points each month allows our data scientists and service teams to deliver an integrated, comprehensive and longitudinal view of almost the entire patient journey. Our partners are using the Philips Wellcentive population health management platform, not only to derive faster insights and drive better care, but to capture significant value-based revenue — more than $700 million to date.
DISCLAIMER: Results from case studies are not predictive of results in other cases. Results in other cases may vary.
