Dutch giant Philips and New Jersey consultant Cognizant are developing end-to-end digital health technology so healthcare organisations and life sciences companies can improve patient care and accelerate clinical trials.

The alliance brings together Philips HealthSuite, a cloud-based platform, and Cognizant’s digital engineering expertise to deliver and maintain digital health technology at scale, providing connectivity and using big data to create actionable insights.

HealthSuite, built on Amazon Web Services, is an integrated, modular set of standards-based capabilities that support the development of digital health propositions. The platform securely stores critical healthcare data and provides data analytics and AI capabilities, while delivering interoperability, connectivity and regulatory compliance.

To date, more than 100 types of medical devices have been integrated into HealthSuite, with over 145 billion clinical images securely archived on the cloud platform.

Cognizant plans to build, deploy, implement and operate client-specific applications on HealthSuite. These customisable, scalable apps integrate data analytics, helping improve the patient and clinician experience by providing relevant data to the appropriate point-of-care.

With these, healthcare providers can monitor their patients outside traditional clinical settings, and patients can stay more informed of their own well-being. In addition, biopharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers can quickly gain actionable insights through analytics to make more informed clinical development decisions and rapidly bring new services to patients.

“Despite advances, patients and clinicians still face a fragmented technology and data landscape that holds back innovative healthcare services which improve care quality and the human experience,” said Shez Partovi, chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips. “Philips is committed to driving the digital transformation of healthcare. Partnering with Cognizant’s experienced digital engineering teams will accelerate the adoption of solutions built on Philips HealthSuite, delivering digital solutions across the healthcare continuum in a secure and compliant manner, and ultimately helping guide better health decisions for patients.”

For life sciences companies, HealthSuite’s compliant and secure medical device connectivity, data integration and analysis should also benefit remote patient monitoring and decentralised clinical trials. This should enable a reduction in paperwork, help researchers reach more diverse trial participants and improve connectivity between investigators and participants, with the goal of improving the quality and speed of therapy development.

“Cognizant and Philips are each dedicated to improving people’s lives through health technology,” said Ursula Morgenstern, president of global growth markets at Cognizant. “This new collaboration will provide critical solutions that help manage the growing amount of health data available, keep patients and providers better connected, and help accelerate life-saving therapies to market, Virtual and digital health are fundamental to improving health awareness and engagement. We are proud to work with Philips, a world leader in health tech, to support the health and well-being of people everywhere.”