Royal Philips and Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH) announced a ten-year strategic partnership on Wednesday that will give the health system access to Philips' latest patient monitoring innovations.

Unlike traditional capital purchase agreements, the arrangement includes ongoing maintenance security, upgrades, and user training.

"As patient monitoring technology continues to advance and hospital budgets remain challenged, hospitals face a dilemma," Julia Strandberg, executive vice president and chief business leader of Connected Care at Philips, told HCB News. "Over time, the result is often a patchwork of disconnected systems — different monitors, varying monitoring software versions, and an environment with potentially different monitoring vendors."

Through this partnership model, Philips gives hospitals access to its latest patient monitoring technology and healthcare informatics solutions, which helps them standardize patient monitoring across all care settings and acuity levels. Depending on the hospital's needs, the partnership can also include ongoing software updates, system maintenance, and security patching.

BSMH has a network of over 1,200 care sites, 60,000 associates, and 49 hospitals in Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, and Ireland. In addition to standardizing their patient monitoring technology, this partnership will also help them reduce costs.

Strandberg explained that through Philips Capital, they will help BSMH finance the patient monitoring systems through a predictable payment model. They will be able to adopt the technology in the initial phase of the partnership and then gradually scale it across their locations over the contract's duration.

According to Jodi Pahl, chief nursing officer at BSMH, they will implement the technology over the next three years and then focus on maintenance and updates in the following seven years.

This partnership will be especially beneficial for BSMH clinicians because it will help to lessen their digital burden and allow them to spend more time with patients.

"Instead of different monitoring solutions sending data to the patient health record and the staff needing to understand these systems and go through different screens to make sure the data is captured in the patient record, it will be one seamless experience," said Strandberg.

For instance, if a patient is being transferred from the emergency department to another hospital within the system, staff would usually have to re-enter the patient data or spend time going between different screens. With the new Philips technology, the staff will only have to enter the data once and have access to it all throughout the health system.

The partnership will include Philips enterprise patient monitoring solution, including its Clinical Insight Manager, which is an open and scalable cloud platform. It's able to analyze high-fidelity retrospective data such as diagnostic-quality ECG and has intuitive dashboards that BSMH can use to identify trends to support research, clinical, and operational improvements.

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