Royal Philips announced on Friday that it acquired the cloud-based population health management solution vendor VitalHealth for an undisclosed amount.

"Although the notion of population health management has already been there for some time, as a market it is embryonic," Carla Kriwet, chief business leader of connected care and health informatics at Philips, told HCB News. "The adoption is still in its early stages, but there is a true transformation going on in the health care industry as we move toward value-based health care, and I expect that the adoption will accelerate over the next few years."

The deal with VitalHealth will add advanced analytics, care coordination, patient engagement, and outcome management solutions to Philips' existing population health management portfolio.

Mayo Clinic and the Noaber Foundation founded VitalHealth in the Netherlands in 2006, and today it has about 200 employees. The company’s products and services are in use in over 100 health care networks in the U.S., India, China, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Those products include a portfolio of telehealth applications, as well as a care coordination platform that integrates patient information across care settings and aggregates data from different information systems.

That will complement Philips’ population health management portfolio, which it acquired from Wellcentive in 2016, and strengthen Philips’ HealthSuite digital platform. The combined solution will help health care providers better manage high-risk and high-cost patient populations.

"Through the acquisition of Wellcentive and its data analytics, we were already particularly strong in the ‘understand’ part, while our previous organic investments in telehealth programs and home monitoring have resulted in positive results in the ‘activate’ part," said Kriwet. "VitalHealth has a particular strength in the ‘navigate’ part of our three-pronged approach."

In October, Philips announced that the Colorado-based integrated delivery network HealthONE adopted its Wellcentive informatics platform. Nine other health care organizations including Banner Health in Arizona and Rostock University Medical Center in Germany have recently selected or renewed relationships with Philips to assist with population health management.

The global population health management market was worth $14.5 billion last year and is expected to skyrocket to $60.6 billion by 2024, according to a Data Bridge Market Research report. In this new health care climate, in which providers are challenged to provide proactive care, this is becoming a must-have technology.

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