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CEO Frans van Houten said the 18-year contract with Mackenzie is the
kind of deal that will become increasingly important to Philips when
it becomes a pure "health tech" company next year. Philips is in the
process of selling its lighting division, the world's largest
lighting maker.
In the past, Philips and major competitors Siemens and General
Electric competed primarily on the price and quality of individual
high-end healthcare machines such as CT scanners or patient
monitoring systems.
Under the deal with Mackenzie, Philips will collaborate in the
design and outfitting of Mackenzie's systems and equipment,
including room layout and IT design, with the goal of lowering costs
and improving patients' health.
In a telephone interview, Van Houten said the goal is to manage the
process as a whole, from preventing health problems in the first
place all the way through to care after a patient returns home from
a hospital stay.
"A siloed approach between suppliers doesn't really help hospitals
well enough" anymore, Van Houten said.
"You need to follow the patient (throughout an interface with the
health system) and you need to integrate the data."
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The deal is one of a number the company has inked in recent years of
increasing size, he said.
In 2013 and 2014 it signed $300 million deals with Georgia Regents
Medical Center and Karolinska Hospital in Sweden. In June it signed
a $500 million deal with U.S. Westchester Medical Center Health
Network, its largest contract of this kind to date.
(Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by Susan Fenton)
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