Royal Philips Electronics, Microsoft collaborate to improve Philips Healthcare's efficiency and productivity

Royal Philips Electronics ( PHG, AEX: PHI) today announced collaboration with Microsoft Corp. to build on Philips Healthcare's foundation of healthcare informatics and advanced clinical decision support offerings that drive efficiency and effectiveness at the point of care. Working together, the companies aim to integrate technologies that will yield faster delivery of meaningful health information, further improve healthcare efficiency and productivity, and reduce development and infrastructure costs.

"We are driving towards a significant paradigm shift from, on the one hand, simply reporting healthcare analytics to, on the other hand, creating systems which actually provide access to health information when and where it is needed," said Deborah DiSanzo, CEO, Healthcare Informatics and Patient Monitoring, for Philips Healthcare. "Philips and Microsoft are in a unique position to work together for the betterment of the healthcare system by effectively helping to close the healthcare technology loop."

The companies share a common vision for advancing healthcare transformation: simplified clinician workflow, better financial outcomes and improved patient care.

"Information is only as powerful as the ability to share it among those that play an integral role in patient care," said Tim Smokoff, general manager of Worldwide Health at Microsoft. "This collaboration is a step toward integrating different sources of information, and then providing actionable knowledge in clear, useful formats that suit the needs of the different people who are working to improve care at the point of care."

At the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2010 Conference & Exhibition, Philips and Microsoft are showcasing two works-in-progress born of their collaboration: integration of Philips VISICU's eICU® Program with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010 Beta; and Philips IntelliVue XDS, which is being adapted to run on Windows 7.

Philips VISICU eICU Program

The Philips VISICU eICU Program is an integrated healthcare solution for remote, 24-hour monitoring of critically ill patients. Philips, in collaboration with Microsoft, is showcasing a conceptual Critical Care Analytics Portal designed to support executive decision-making.  

Being demonstrated for feedback at HIMSS10, the eICU Program/SharePoint solution seeks to aggregate critical patient information in a way that can be easily accessed, seamlessly shared and simply utilized. Combining users' familiarity with Microsoft interfaces and SharePoint's strengths, the solution aims to create a standardized front-end analytics portal to display information from the Philips VISICU eICU Program database and enables executives to view, share and analyze ICU data relating to their health system's operations.

"In today's data-intensive, fast-paced critical care environment, specialists often make critical life and death decisions for the patients under their care," said Curtis Veal, M.D., Critical Care and eICU Medical Director for Swedish Medical Center. "We continue to utilize advanced systems like the eICU Program that facilitate shared access to both clinical and operational data for optimal delivery of patient care."

Philips IntelliVue XDS

Philips and Microsoft will also demonstrate technology interoperability with a look at the first of Philips' patient monitoring connectivity products, currently being adapted to run on Windows 7.

Philips IntelliVue XDS Clinical Workstation provides fast, convenient access to patient-focused clinical information from hospital IT systems on Philips IntelliVue monitors. XDS creates a flexible, customizable clinical workspace, combining patient monitoring views and IT applications, with the ability to interact freely among them to optimize patient care. By leveraging the user-friendly capabilities of Microsoft Windows 7, IntelliVue XDS will allows users the ability to launch multiple third-party IT applications within the familiar Windows environment.