Startups, Payers

Comcast and Independence Health Group joint venture Quil Health names a CEO

Quil plans to launch its first pilot programs later this year, which looks to be step-by-step content guides to help people navigate specific healthcare journeys like a knee or hip replacement. 

Quil Health, the digital health collaboration between Comcast and Philadelphia health plan Independence Health Group has named longtime health IT executive Carina Edwards as CEO.

The cable company’s answer to the Haven healthcare collaborative was launched last April with the goal of creating a consumer-based healthcare platform leveraging Comcast’s extensive telecommunications experience to create new telemedicine channels and educational health content.

“Providing the right information at the right time in a health care journey can play a huge role in improving patient outcomes by bridging the information gap that exists today in health care,” Edwards said in a statement.

“Our ambition is for Quil to empower and educate patients and caregivers by providing personalized and actionable resources, in part to help answer the question ‘what happens next’ and to enable them to become the healthiest version of themselves.”

One of the underlying ideas of the joint venture was to create new healthcare service channels that could quickly scale up through their existing distribution methods.

The joint venture is seeking to provide personalized healthcare content and information to patients and caretakers which can be distributed nationally through the organization’s cloud-based platform.

Quil plans to launch its first pilot programs later this year, which looks to be step-by-step content guides to help people navigate specific healthcare journeys like a knee or hip replacement.

Edwards comes to Quil from Imprivata where she served as the health IT company’s senior vice president of customer experience. Prior to her time at Imprivata, Edwards served in a variety of leadership roles at companies including Nuance Communications, Philips Healthcare and Zynx Health.

At a MedCity News event last year, Quil Chief Medical Officer Gary Zimmer spoke about leveraging Comcast’s entertainment and news resources with Independence Health’s medical acumen to bring conversations about health to the forefront.

“I can imagine a world where health is pervasive in what you do, so that there’s messaging from the entertainment world that matches the initiative of the month … So that when Al Roker makes a comment on the Today Show its messaging that linked into the positive health images and can direct you to appropriate resources,” Zimmer said.

That wasn’t just a hypothetical. Roker is featured prominently in a video on Quil’s website introducing people to the organization.

Picture: marchmeena29, Getty Images

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