UCSF, Philips to Co-Develop Tools to Improve Digital Patient Experience
The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) has entered into a partnership with global health IT vendor Royal Philips to develop digital health tools.
UCSF said it would use Philips’ HealthSuite Platform to oversee the development of technologies that use artificial intelligence to enable personalization and make it easier for patients to select providers, access their health information and receive virtual care at home, while also easing the burden on care providers with intuitive workflows and real-time decision support.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, Philips said its open API-based ecosystem will foster the level of third-party innovation that, combined with UCSF’s clinical expertise, can achieve these goals.
The work will address the significant challenge of integrating data from the multitude of often incompatible software systems that generate and track patient information, a problem that is intensifying as health systems expand their networks and extend care beyond hospitals and clinics into the community. The lack of interoperability often requires manual re-entry or hunting down data among the different systems. Integrating these different data streams will ease the burden on clinical staff, provide richer analytics and enable more coordinated orchestration of care across diverse settings.
“Our goal in partnering with Philips is to serve our patients better,” said Aaron Neinstein, M.D., associate professor of medicine and director of clinical informatics at the UCSF Center for Digital Heath Innovation, in a statement. “The services we enable on this platform will help people more easily find the right provider for the care they need, eliminating the worries and delays people often experience. We know that people need convenient access to care, whether for their acute symptoms or chronic conditions, and we can provide a more comprehensive, continuous feeling of support from their care team enabled by virtual and in-person experiences across their care journey.”
One goal of the co-developed solutions will be to power coordination and the frictionless flow of care across traditional boundaries of geography, hospital or site of care. “Over the past few years, UCSF Health has developed a network of high-quality providers across the Bay Area who share our vision to make health care more accessible, affordable and personalized,” said Shelby Decosta, president of UCSF Health Affiliates Network and chief strategy officer for UCSF Health, in a statement. “Our partnership with Philips will empower UCSF Health with navigation tools to bring this vision to life across our network of world-class hospitals, community clinics and outpatient centers, as well as through virtual care.”
The agreement with Philips includes a combination of applied research and digital solution implementation, ranging from developing advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to virtual care delivery solutions.
