The company has recently inked partnerships with major U.S. insurers and electronic health record companies. Partnerships with health systems, including Hoag and Rush Health, adding to a deal with Bon Secours Mercy Health from last year. This year has also seen the launch of a new AI marketplace for ECG, with further investment in AI technologies to boost connected care efforts.
Beyond health systems, the company has inked some major collaborations and expanded partnerships with big medtech names like Masimo, Medtronic and Getinge.
According to Julia Strandberg, the company’s chief business leader of Connected Care, the company is using these partnerships to deliver on its goals, creating efficiency and safety for health systems and beyond. This isn’t new, either, as Strandberg explained in an interview with MassDevice in 2023.
Strandberg recently spoke to MassDevice again about Philips Connected Care, its partnerships, the use of AI and more.
The following has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
An introduction to Strandberg’s aims with the Philips Connected Care business
Julia Strandberg: “I’ve been here for about two-and-a-half years with 20-plus years of experience in monitoring informatics and digital health between large companies and smaller organizations. It’s really trying to understand the nuances and differences amongst organizations that are facilitating this kind of informatics, digital health-driven world. My entire career has been about impact-driven and market-moving into innovation. It is how innovation really meets market need, and then how we use elements like product-market fit, which is an approach and methodology that many people use, as well as market development principles, to ultimately drive adoption of the innovations at every step.”
What is driving the company’s push toward Connected Care?
JS: “It is about three things. It is about the patients that we serve, the customer that we engage with, and then the team that I have around me. I believe that those three elements of focus are critical for business success, but also moving the needle on care delivery.”
“At the end of the day, why am I here is, first of all, Philips Connected Care has strength globally, and can really, really make a shift and change in care delivery. [It’s about finding out how] we can use technology to support clinical, operational and financial benefit for the health system, ultimately helping us within the community.”
How Philips’ structure approaches Connected Care
JS: “Philips has three big businesses: Connected Care, Diagnosis and Treatment and Personal Health. Connected Care is connecting health from the hospital to the home, from cardiovascular into respiratory… We are a very large software driven organization, and but we also know that Philips can’t do it alone, so, more and more… we know that we need to come together as an ecosystem to achieve the mission of the group. We’re the global leader in monitoring, and I call it management, both in hospital and [alternative] settings. We are the number one provider of mobile cardiac telemetry, which an ambulatory monitoring service focused on assessing heart rhythms and providing recommendations to primary care cardiology and electrophysiology throughout the health system. We take a No. 1, No. 2 position in many different areas within my group, and then obviously we need to connect it all together.”
The “five rights”
JS: “You’ve heard of the phenomena of the five rights — right place, right time, right patient, right intervention and the right outcome. That’s our aim. In Connected Care, the market has accelerated to deliver efficiencies and outcomes in care delivery since COVID. It’s not just large health systems that are coming together, but it’s also physician practices that are now getting acquired to become health system-affiliated practices. The ecosystem is coming together… and that just gives us a basis for which we can continue to drive standardization of patient monitoring into large health systems.”
“We’re working on a lot of cool innovations with our large health system clients to again support the next level of standardization that allows us to digitize, which allows us to automate. Automation allows us to deliver care really where the patient is.”
The role of strategic partnerships
JS: “It’s being humble in two ways. Humility is [the idea] that we can’t do it all, so we need partnerships, and we have to act as an ecosystem. … It’s about bringing the technologies together to serve the aim and mission of the health system. First, it’s an acknowledgement that you can’t do everything. Second, it’s how you do it in a way that allows each one of the partners, plus Philips, to shine and offer that value proposition.”
“We do a lot of what I would say is vendor-to-vendor partnerships. But, humility also shows that health systems have a lot of value. We want to deliver value to them so they can engage in patient patient care and patient health, but also, our clients and customers have a lot of technology. They think of it as like, almost like a learning lab. They have a tremendous opportunity to change the game, and so partnering with large organizations… is how we make sure that we’re continuing to raise the level of value that we’re deploying.”
How is AI factored into these efforts at Philips?
JS: “We’re using [AI] in two discrete ways. One is using it internally. From an organization standpoint, it’s about efficiencies and productivity and how we engage innovation faster and faster. We’re bringing in AI in a variety of different areas to help us with complaint management, coding, etc. It’s really important and having governance around it is exceptionally important.”
“How does AI come into the paradigm of care delivery? I see it happening in a few different ways. … We have the power of this new paradigm that’s incredibly exciting in generative AI. We know that we need to put evidence behind the living algorithms because it’s really important. Then, there’s the ethical use and education associated with it. We strongly believe that we need to protect and develop it in a transparent way.”
“There’s also the operational use of AI. This is a lot about optimizing workflows, really understanding resource management, staffing management, etc.”
“Supporting fundamental intelligence and engagement at the clinician level, then at the patient level, when we achieve that, we’re going to have fluidity between the hospital and home and achieve the aim that I want to achieve — and many of our customers want to achieve — which is preventing bad things from happening.”
What about the growing role of “as a service” elements of Connected Care?
JS: “We are continuing to move towards ‘as a service’ models where software and services are dominant, not hardware. It’s about how we make sure that we understand the shifting reality of our health systems. Across the globe, they’re suffering financially. We believe that our ability to go into these as a service models support where health systems are and where they need to go. Frankly, it’s a great quid-pro-quo, because as a service means you need to get incredibly close to your customer and understand their needs and deliver their needs. … We believe that the as a service model is consistent with where we want to go as an organization.”
“More and more, we see our hospitals and health system clients engage in a different way of financial exchange and value exchange. It’s been quite a nice evolution for us and it puts more emphasis on software. It’s about making sure our service models can do everything from watching monitors and the infrastructure of a health system. We’re doing this on behalf of our clients, but we also do a lot of innovation and development on the platform. You can do it in quite an agile way, and this business model allows us to do that.”
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