At HIMSS18, Philips plans to announce several new additions to its line of connected care products. A new management system called FocusPoint will help give hospitals more visibility into the performance of their patient monitoring technology. 

Philips also plans to introduce the next generation of its HealthSuite collection of digital health tools, which will include analytics and artificial intelligence.

Carla Kriwet, CEO of Philips’ Connected Care and Health Informatics division stressed that Philips is focused on making sure that all of its connected devices are well thought-out, with a tested backend workflow as well as good data collection.

“There’s a flood of data,” she said. “The question is how do you make sense of the data and once you’ve made sense of the data how are you activating the workflow in a way that you get to the Quadruple Aim? That’s the key question. we have the clinical insights, we understand the workflows, and we can activate it.”

One thing that ties together many of the different technology initiatives of the company is a desire to continuously monitor and connect patients across the care continuum, both within the hospital and at home.

“Within the hospital, to start with, it’s about patients moving all the way from the ER to the cath lab, to the general ward and back and being continuously monitored,” Kriwet said. “So we have launched a proposition called Intellivue X3, which is a mobile monitor with continuous data flow to the central station. So all the issues you had in the past with cabling and uncabling and interruption of the workflow, and interruption of the data, which was actually quite risky for the patient is now going away with this device.”

That’s one way Philips is monitoring patients in the hospital. Another is Guardian, a wearable-based early warning system for cardiac patients. The device measures respiratory rate, heart rate, position, movement, and temperature, and uses an algorithm to alert caregivers hours before a likely heart attack.

“That’s important because a lot of patients die in the general ward because their deterioration isn’t noticed, because there’s one nurse for 10 patients, and not one for one or one for 2 like in the ICU, and there has not been this continuous monitoring in the past,” Kriwet said. “So that’s a big innovation.”

Finally, Philips monitors patients at home with Respironics sleep monitoring and its mPERS business, among other things.