Royal Philips is teaming with Texas A&M University on a health innovation initiative in population health management, emergency medical services and biosurveillance. This includes setting up the Center for Global Health and Innovation on the College Station, Texas, campus.
The innovation center will seek to support public-private partnerships in rapid design and testing of new ideas in healthcare. The overall collaboration is part of a state-funded pilot project at Texas A&M called Healthy South Texas, which focuses on preventing diabetes, asthma and infectious diseases in 27 counties in South Texas.
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“This program puts us shoulder-to-shoulder with those who are on the front line of care, giving us unprecedented insight into developing real-life applications and solutions that can make a difference in human health on both a local and global scale,” said Hans Aloys-Wischmann, head of Philips Research for North America.
Healthy South Texas aims to build a foundation for disease prevention, community outreach by healthcare professionals and patient engagement in a region with generally poor health status. In population health, Philips and Texas A&M will look to identify and then scale best practices across the country and the world, the entities said.
In EMS, the goal is better management of scarce resources, so Philips and the university will develop a platform for coordinating EMS supplies and service. They also want to help public health authorities improve disaster response.
The two partners also will look to build a network for monitoring infectious diseases. Philips will be leaning on A&M’s long history of animal biosurveillance, the company said. About 70 percent of all “emerging” diseases are transmitted from animals to humans, according to Dr. Mark Hussey, dean of the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
This is the latest in a series of academic partnerships Philips has forged. On June 1, the Dutch company announced it would team with Yale School of Medicine on research in interventional oncology. Last September, Philips agreed to team with Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop new techniques for measuring intracranial pressure.
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