NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital will expand its virtual care capabilities with remote monitoring services from Philips.
The hospital’s affiliated doctors at Weill Cornell Medicine will utilize the Philips eCareCoordinator and eCareCompanion solutions. Additionally, its affiliated physicians at Columbia University Irving Medical Center anticipate using the tools.
The eCareCoordinator platform lets clinicians remotely keep an eye on patients’ vital signs and send them short surveys about their health status. The eCareCompanion tool allows patients to use a tablet and connected medical devices to share their health information (like weight, blood pressure and glucose levels) with their care team.
“NewYork-Presbyterian is pleased to collaborate with Philips to empower patients, who don’t need to be in the hospital, to actively monitor their health from the comfort of their home,” Peter Fleischut, senior vice president and chief transformation officer of NewYork-Presbyterian, said in a statement.
Ultimately, the aim of the tools is to reduce patients’ length of stay in the hospital, decrease preventable readmissions and cut back on visits to the emergency room.
“As the number of individuals living with chronic conditions continues to rise, hospitals and health systems need to innovate to best manage the growing demands on their resources,” Derek Ross, business leader of population health management at Philips, said in a news release.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
This isn’t the first time the two entities have teamed up.
Last month, they inked a 10-year agreement through which NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital plans to implement the Philips IntelliSpace Enterprise Edition solution across its hospitals and facilities.
The healthcare organization will gain access to Philips’ informatics tools in radiology, cardiology and analytics. The implementation gives clinicians and radiologists at NYP access to solutions for radiology informatics, advanced 3D informatics, cardiology informatics and analytics informatics.
The goal of the long-term contract is to give NewYork-Presbyterian a better way to store data and enable physicians to access images in a more timely manner.
Photo: nito100, Getty Images
