Mountain View (CA) US, 9 October 9, 2015: Philips has won the 2015 Global Frost & Sullivan Emerging Market Innovation Award for boosting healthcare delivery in emerging markets through its disruptive technologies. A majority of the solutions  were crafted at its India Innovation Centre in Bangalore.
For instance, Philips’s IntelliSpace Consultative Care solution is designed to offer specialist care to remote intensive care units (ICUs) that lack trained medical professionals. The solution enables critical care specialists in tier-1 cities to manage patients in understaffed ICUs across tier-2/3 cities by accessing their medical history and communicating with nurses in these locations.
Another one of Philips’s disruptive solutions is VISIQ, a tablet ultrasound that conducts procedures and computes results. The device is used in primary healthcare centers (PHCs) to improve maternal health in emerging markets such as India. In contrast to traditional ultrasound devices, the solution also acts as a communication tool.
To improve maternal health, Philips has implemented the Mobile Obstetric Monitoring (MoM) project that makes use of a mobile phone application to remotely monitor pregnant women. Midwives can collect data through phones and send it to a server from which doctors can review the progress of pregnancies.“There are three ways of communicating the results in the MoM application—over the Internet, through an encrypted text message or by a universal serial bus (USB) cable,” said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Ankita Mukherji. “The last two options prove to be especially useful to transmit results from PHCs to secondary and tertiary care centers in emerging markets.”
For the Indian market, Philips has also designed a small portable electrocardiogram (ECG) unit—Efficia ECG 100. Unlike other portable ECGs in the market, the Efficia ECG 100 is a diagnostic-quality product. Additionally, this unit can be connected to mobile phones and tablets to display results and transmit information.
With the introduction of these emerging market solutions, Philips has achieved substantial commercial success over the past few years. The IntelliSpace Consultative Critical Care solution, which was only introduced in 2013, has already registered 1,400 beds. VISIQ and Efficia ECG 100 have been in the market for little more than a year, but adoption rates have been steadily increasing.
Robust business strategies and market models are partly responsible for Philips’s growth thus far. To address the price sensitivity in emerging markets, the company uses subscription models for most of its products. The IntelliSpace Consultative Critical Care solution is offered on a per-night, per-bed basis, whereas the other products are available on a per-use basis.