MUSC Health Invests $36M in Patient Monitoring Technology Partnership
Charleston-based Medical University of South Carolina Health (MUSC Health) announced an 8-year, $36 million strategic partnership with Philips to implement integrated patient monitoring technologies.
The partnership is based on an enterprise managed services model through which Philips will install, integrate and manage patient monitoring systems and software, as well as provide maintenance, training and consulting services, according to a MUSC Health press release.
MUSC Health is a 750-bed medical center and is the clinical enterprise of Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). MUSC serves patients across South Carolina and beyond through four hospital facilities in Charleston and more than 100 outreach sites. The goal of the partnership is to transform patient monitoring for more than one million patients a year.
“We want to give our staff, learners, and patients access to the best patient monitoring technologies in order to deliver on the highest quality, safest, and most reliable healthcare through the use of Phillips patient monitoring equipment across our entire enterprise,” Patrick Cawley, M.D., CEO of MUSC Health, said in a statement.
Frans van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips, said in a statement, “Due to a growing aging population and the rising number of people with chronic diseases, healthcare providers are seeking more cost-effective ways to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients. As the healthcare industry is evolving, long-term, strategic partnerships are becoming the business model of choice, allowing health systems to address value-based models and keep pace with technology, while improving the patient experience.”
Through this long-term, strategic partnership, Philips will provide MUSC Health with continuous access to standardized, current-state patient monitoring technology, implementation, and asset management services. With this approach, MUSC aims to implement a standardized clinical practice based on defined monitoring configurations and also enable integration and interoperability with other clinical IT systems. MUSC Health’s goal is to have better collection and management of patient data in order to provide more informed, proactive diagnostic and treatment services, helping to reduce complications, adverse events, length of stay, and readmissions, according to the press release.
In less than a year, Philips has signed four long-term, strategic partnerships in North America including Westchester Medical Center Health Network (15 year term); Mackenzie Health (18 year term); and Marin General Hospital (15 year term).
