Philips Healthcare Mexico
Produced by Lucy Verde
In September 2014, Philips announced that it will divide the company in two parts: The first focused on lighting solutions and the second on health technology. This move will ensure that both divisions can attract the focus they need to remain key players in their respective marketplaces.
For Philips Mexico, it means that actions will focus more and more on providing solutions for healthy living. Where previously the company’s focus was on manufacturing and selling products, in the future Philips will partner long term with key clients in the private and public sectors.
Focus on health tech: Providing care from the hospital to the home
Being a leading supplier of healthcare technology for both private and public hospitals, Philips has always offered the best equipment available for diagnostic imaging and monitoring. Recent additions to this catalogue include the only digital MRI solution currently available in the market, a digital PET-CT solution capable of diagnosing cancer faster and more accurately with half the radiation and a spectral CT scanner, which provides diagnostic precision levels as never seen before.
However, Philips Healthcare’s operations now encompass a spectrum not limited to supplying equipment for hospitals alone.
“If we truly want to improve healthcare for Mexicans, we need to look at the full continuum of care,” said Mark Stoffels, and added: “This means that we should work to make sure a patient does not have to go to the hospital in the first place. And if they have to, we should try to make their stay as short as possible so that they can soon return to the comfort of their own homes. Our strategy is to become the best provider of solutions across this continuum of care.”
Integrated Solutions: Worth the Investment
Five years ago, Philips acquired TASY, one of the largest providers of hospital informatics solutions in Latin America. In 2014, the company signed its first contracts in Mexico, providing four hospitals with complete TASY hospital informatics systems. This system includes all capabilities needed to manage the workflow of a hospital, from electronic medical records to administrative and clinical protocols.
“If you want to improve the quality of care, you need to be able to lower costs while improving patient outcomes. That is nearly impossible without means to accurately measure performance. And for that, software is indispensable. Combining our informatics solutions with a customer service organization, as well as our recently opened Philips Healthcare Academy, we are uniquely positioned to provide an integral solution to our clients,” Stoffels said.
Providing Solutions: It’s More Than Selling Machines
“The healthcare delivery model of the future will be very different than it is currently,” Stoffels said. Instead of buying a product and a service contract, he said he believes that the future will evolve around partnerships between suppliers and clients. In these partnerships, healthcare providers will pay for just the services they need. These might be studies, scans or even patient outcomes. Big data will play a key role as more and more insights can be drawn from vast amounts of information gathered by devices ranging from hospital equipment to smart phones and other wearable technology.
“It is our job to help our clients make sense of all that information while at the same time taking care of their technology so that they can focus on taking care of their patients,” he said.
Forecast for the Future
Philips Healthcare Mexico is ready to face the specific challenges the country is facing. With a growing and aging population, of which a large part still doesn’t have full access to quality care, Mexico has been selected as a major area of growth for Philips. As government budgets are under ever-growing pressure and private hospitals are continuing their search to reduce costs, the Mexican population needs clever solutions to cater to their needs.
“We want to be at the forefront of healthy living, improving the care of millions of Mexicans. By executing our long-term health tech strategy we plan to do exactly that,” Stoffels said.