How Philips Is Planning Mobile Health Success

A string of announcements this year show Royal Philips seeking to turn its situation around through major plays in mobile health and overall innovation.

Chris Newmarker

Updated November 24, 2015

One of the world's largest medical device companies has been making moves this year to become a major player in mobile health.

Time will tell whether Royal Philips' strategy will turn its business around. Over the first nine months of 2015, the company's stock was one of the worst performing among large medical device companies. Focus could potentially improve after a planned separation of the company's healthcare and lighting businesses.

Here are seven recent reasons to think that Philips best days are ahead of it when it comes to healthcare:

1. App-based Ultrasound

Philips has also announced a unique ultrasound system called Lumify that plugs into an Android tablet and uses the Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform. The app-based ultrasound Lumify system hit the U.S. market on November 19, with health providers paying an initial subscription rate of $199 per month.

2. Hosting Medical Data in the Cloud--with Amazon

The company has announced a collaboration with Amazon to link "hundreds of millions of devices and sensors" to the cloud. Cloud-based services, for example, could be used to harvest data gathered from elderly, processing it to identify health problems and potentially dangerous events such as falls. 

3. A Killer App for Diabetics?

Royal Philips, Salesforce, and the Netherlands-based Radboud university medical center think they've hit on a mobile-based app and online community that could greatly help type-1 diabetes patients manage their condition.

4. Transforming Brain Injury Monitoring

Philips and MIT have forged a partnership to potentially transform the way brain injuries are monitored. The fully non-invasive calibration-free, portable technology would monitor intracranial pressure (ICP) through a combination of Philips ultrasound technology and MIT physiological modeling.

5. Personal Health Programs

Philips is planning a series of "personal health programs"  to eventually help people track everything from heart health to back pain, and will each incorporate a package of Philips devices, apps, and the cloud-based Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform.

6. Bringing Devices into the Mobile Health Mix

Devices Philips is bringing into the personal health programs include the Philips health watch, the Philips upper arm blood pressure monitor, the Philips wrist blood pressure monitor, the Philips body analysis scale, and the Philips ear thermometer.

7. Major Research Partnerships

Philips also has a partnership with the Academic Medical Center (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) for a European multi-center clinical study of a minimally invasive treatment for severe diabetic foot complications. And it recently inked a five-year, $25 million alliance with MIT to further research in its core areas of healthcare and lighting solutions.

Chris Newmarker is senior editor of Qmed and MPMN. Follow him on Twitter at @newmarker.

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