Is Your
Data Strategy Aligned With Your Mission?
For Philips, moving forward required stepping back to reflect on big-picture questions first. What was its core vision? What new data strategy and technology infrastructure would power that vision?
To chip away at its lofty goal to improve the health of 2.5 billion people a year by 2030, Philips needed to improve its back-end infrastructure and create a platform to collect, centrally store and analyze data for its customers from the various touch points in which patients interact with the healthcare system, such as hospitals, private clinics and insurance networks.
Data fragmentation is one of the most persistent challenges in healthcare today. In fact, a Philips survey found that over a third of young healthcare professionals feel overwhelmed by digital patient data, and over a third don’t know how to use it to inform care.
Philips created the Philips HealthSuite platform, a cloud-based solution that centralizes data across the healthcare space, to merge siloed data into a secure, central repository—boosting coordination across the healthcare system, enhancing the patient experience and advancing evidence-based care.
“We wanted to help clinicians and researchers use data to make more informed decisions and empower patients to drive their own care,” says Dale Wiggins, vice president and general manager of the Philips HealthSuite platform.
The secure platform connects data from patient and provider devices, harnesses proprietary data lakes to integrate structured and unstructured data from different sources and enables collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem.
We strive to break down data silos so that we can deliver on our mission.”
Dale Wiggins
Vice President & General Manager, Philips HealthSuite platform
Are You Supplementing Your Strengths With Partnerships?
For companies about to embark on their own data transformations, some advice: Don’t go it alone when a strategic partner can step in.
Since creating connected healthcare solutions for providers is a core expertise for Philips, it collaborated with AWS to tackle the intricacies of Philips HealthSuite’s back-end architecture. Philips built the platform natively on AWS, allowing it to benefit from a flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure that incorporates artificial intelligence-driven automation and continuously monitors its environment.
Security was critical for Philips, since it ingests highly sensitive customer and patient data. The company’s AWS partnership enables it to operate under a shared security model with compliant, secure AWS cloud services, as well as its own customized information security management system with added privacy controls that address extra layers of regulations in the healthcare space, like HIPAA and its customers’ own data governance rules.
Dale Wiggins
Vice President & General Manager, Philips HealthSuite platform
Rather than building systems in-house, Wiggins says companies should embrace their core capabilities first, and then tap tech partners who can help bridge any skills gaps.
We aren't inventing data centers. We’re making use of all the technologies AWS and other partners provide so that we aren’t reinventing the wheel and can instead focus on our unique value.”
Data transformation hinges on cultural transformation.
To that end, it mobilized a small team with cross-functional skills, explains Wiggins, connecting technologists and healthcare experts to inform the development of Philips HealthSuite.
“We were able to get the first propositions into the market in less than two years—that’s from the early days of thinking about the platform to production,” he says.
Philips uses cross-functional collaboration to stay nimble, addressing new customer needs as it improves its HealthSuite platform. The company incorporated customer feedback into its product development and enabled healthcare practices to use de-identified data to uncover trends—like increased patient engagement after telehealth visits, for instance—that could ultimately strengthen care and reduce costs for patients and insurers alike.
“We take a holistic approach,” Wiggins says. “If you’re just bringing together technologists, you may come up with an innovative technical soluion, but you’re never able to actually get it out to customers.”
While Philips prioritizes agility in its tools, the company is also focused on powering speed and efficiency in its internal operations.
Is Your Company Culture Agile?
Dale Wiggins
Vice President & General Manager, Philips HealthSuite platform
You have to take agility to heart. Don’t think you know everything and just start building. Build a little, get customer feedback and then respond accordingly.”
Is Data Your
Daily Practice?
Modernizing your company’s relationship with data isn’t a one-and-done process. It’s a practice.
Wiggins says a solution that allows for real-time data monitoring and closely tracks data throughout its life cycle is an urgent need for healthcare customers. The Philips HealthSuite platform does this by acquiring, managing and archiving data from systems, apps and devices in its central, secure repository and using robust identity and access management tools to ensure only authorized users have access.
It’s important to think ahead too, Wiggins says. “You have to design for scale and for the enterprise from day one.” Internally, teams across your company should get familiar with data and use it to make decisions.
Embracing agility, cloud modernization and its platform-as-a-service approach allows Philips to better serve customers.
“If you aren’t making use of a platform, typically you have to rebuild things over and over again from scratch,” Wiggins says. “The benefits of what we’re doing with the platform is that we’re seeing the common patterns and building to them, so when a new use case comes in, there’s a lot we reuse to get to market quickly and put something in front of customers.”
Dale Wiggins
Vice President & General Manager, Philips HealthSuite platform
Mastering data requires a vision and a routine: continuous improvement, strong execution and daily insight into performance.
We’ve built a really strong platform that provides the foundation for what we’re doing with data and AI within the company. It’s the enterprise mindset we took that served us well.”
