Royal Philips, a healthcare technology company, and salesforce.com, a provider of customer relationship management software, have announced a strategic alliance to deliver an open, cloud-based healthcare platform, leveraging Philips' medical technology, clinical applications and clinical informatics and salesforce.com's experience in enterprise cloud computing, innovation and customer engagement.

Patient relationship management will be at the center of the envisioned platform, allowing caregivers to collaborate closely in support of their patients. The platform will enable medical device and data interoperability—the collection of data and subsequent analysis to enhance clinical decision making by professionals and enabling patients to take a more active role in managing their personal health.

The collaboration already has resulted in two clinical applications to be launched on the new platform later this summer: "Philips eCareCoordinator" and "Philips eCareCompanion."

These care collaboration applications will allow the care team to monitor patients with chronic conditions in their homes and will facilitate Philips' Hospital to Home clinical programs, such as Banner iCare, being piloted at Banner Health, an accountable care organization in Arizona. Similar telehealth-based care delivery models for hospitals utilizing the Philips eICU program were shown to reduce mortality by 26% and length of stay by 20% in a recent large, multi-center study.

"Philips is making great strides to deliver real-time, digital healthcare solutions," said Frans van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips. "Healthcare data exists in many different forms and in many different systems today. Together with salesforce.com, we have a tremendous opportunity to reshape and optimize the way healthcare is delivered and provide better access to data across the continuum of care."

Philips and salesforce.com envision that apps will cover the continuum of care: from self-care and prevention, to diagnosis and treatment through recovery and wellness. The envisioned platform, based on the Salesforce1 Platform, will enable collaboration and workflow, as well as integration of data from multiple sources worldwide, including electronic medical records, diagnostic and treatment information obtained through Philips' imaging equipment, monitoring equipment, personal devices and technologies like Apple's HealthKit.

The cloud-based platform is designed to be highly scalable with built-in privacy and data security. By combining the data, the platform will allow for analysis that will enhance decision making by professionals and engage patients. Both Philips and salesforce.com foresee that the platform will utilize Philips' clinical data stores and medical device interoperability. It is intended to be open to developers. As a result, the envisioned platform has the potential to transform both professional healthcare delivery and continuous personal health management.