Qualcomm Life: Healthy Circles Acquisition Enriches Medical Device Data

Qualcomm Life (San Diego) has acquired the coordinated care platform HealthyCircles, which it will link to its wireless 2net platform. The acquisition will enable clinicans to share information from electronic health records and biometric data on the 2net platform. "I think this is also actually very exciting for the medical device engineering community," says HealthyCircles founder James Mault, MD, who is now Qualcomm Life's chief medical officer. With the combination with 2net and Healthy Circles, engineers have the ability to present additional metadata from devices to clinicians. For instance, a device could transmit data to a clinician and present ancillary information such as the model number of the device generating the data. "You have the ability for the medical device and engineers to distinguish their products and be able to better identify the data that is generated from their devices into a presentation layer that allows the clinicians to be able to make more sense of that information," Mault said.

The Healthy Circles acquisition also enables data and query sets to be sent back to the medical device. "This is game changing for the medical device industry," Mault explained, choosing not to go into specifics at present. "You can start on an engineering level and be able to enable devices to do exciting new things. I'll have to hold that thought though."

Qualcomm Life vice president and general manager Rick Valencia provided further information on the relevance of the Healthy Circles acquisition. "From a 2net standpoint, we are focused almost exclusively on engaging with the medical device manufacturers to help them get the data from patients in the home setting--from their medical devices back to where it needs to be--whether that is an EMR or an application that is associated with that medical device or any other type of system that helps someone manage their condition, etc.," he said. "It is just one data stream, right? What Healthy Circles does for us is that helps to create the care team that a hospital is going to need upon discharge of a patient," he added. "It helps to create that care team quickly between the doctor and the patient and the hospital and the pharmacy and the patient's family members and allow for the flow of data between all of those constituents on a permissions basis quickly and easily." It enriches the data from a medical device that might just be biometric device or manually entered data from a patient, he adds.

Brian Buntz is the editor-in-chief of MPMN. Follow him on Twitter at @brian_buntz.

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