Addressing a major innovation opportunity in health together with start-ups at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit

At the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2019 (GES), which took place 3-5 June in Den Haag, the Netherlands, Philips set an ambitious goal for a select group of start-up companies: create new innovations in patient monitoring and analytics that deliver on healthcare’s quadruple aim: better health outcomes, improved staff satisfaction and patient experience, and lower cost of care.

Patient monitoring is an area of healthcare that is undergoing radical transformation. Philips is already a world leader in the field. A groundbreaking great recent innovation from the company is IntelliSpace Epidemiology, a decision support solution that helps infection prevention and control teams identify infection outbreaks in the hospital early, so they can intervene and help to stop the spread.

Many start-ups are also active in this field, developing methods of patient monitoring both inside and outside of the hospital, and helping resolve communication problems and workflow inefficiencies that can lead to patient complications, unwanted clinical performance variation and additional costs. Today, there is already an increasing focus on monitoring individual patients and patient populations outside of the hospital. For the future, there is a growing opportunity to enable patients to recover at home, combining the power of being remotely monitored by clinicians with the support of friends and family in a familiar environment.

GES 2019 has served as a great opportunity for Philips to connect with health technology entrepreneurs and see what ideas are out there that have the potential to improve patient monitoring. For the event, Philips worked closely with the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in order to find and engage those innovative entrepreneurs and their start-up companies who are working on game-changing technologies and can benefit from the support that Philips has to offer.

“Our focus at Philips HealthWorks is to accelerate breakthrough innovation,” said Alberto Prado, Head of Philips HealthWorks, which manages start-up collaboration programs within the company. “There is a world of amazing health technology innovations and ideas out there. At GES we engaged with promising start-ups to develop innovations in an area of technology that could have a big impact on improving the delivery of healthcare in the future.”

Since its inception, over 40 start-up alumni have had the opportunity to go through the Philips HealthWorks acceleration program. Today, just under half of those start-ups have an ongoing collaboration with Philips or are about to start one. Through the program, Philips supports its alumni to achieve their ambitions in health technology, contributing to the company’s goal of improving 3 billion lives by 2030.

Start-ups were able to submit their patient monitoring innovations through GES 2019 to get access to the Philips HealthWorks program beginning in September. Entrepreneurs that couldn’t attend GES can still apply for the program at https://www.healthworks.philips.com/pages/signup/. 

Philips’ HealthWorks start-up collaboration programs complement the company’s global research and development program, its acquisitions driven portfolio extensions and its venture capital activities.