Dive Brief:
- Salesforce, a global cloud company best known for its customer service product, announced Thursday that it is launching an "open cloud-based healthcare platform." The product is in partnership with electronics company Phillips.
- The partnership's initial offerings will connect patient sensors with cloud-based software to monitor chronically-ill patients. The software will aggregate, analyze and effectively triage patients, allowing a provider responsible for a group of patients to prioritize who needs immediate assistance.
- Providers, insurers and healthcare software and device producers will be able to link to the Salesforce health cloud.
Dive Insight:
Efficient management of chronically-ill patients through remote monitoring is being pursued by many providers and other healthcare groups with the hope that it will reduce expensive ER visits and readmissions—and the impact on the market for these devices is dramatic. According to a new report by iData Research, the U.S. market for patient monitoring technology will surpass $5 billion by 2020.
Making Salesforce's announcement even more timely is the fact that hospitals are beginning to trust and embrace the cloud technology, not just monitoring hardware. According to a recent HIMSS survey, 83% of respondents said they use the cloud, and half of those use it to host clinical apps.