Qualcomm Life Acquires HealthyCircles, Betters Coordination of Care

On May 5, Qualcomm Life acquired HealthyCircles, a move which enables the companies to combine their services in order to improve coordination of care for patients being monitored in their homes. The acquisition nearly doubles the size of Qualcomm Life in addition to providing access to HealthyCircle’s Software as a service Care Orchestration Engine.

The Care Orchestration Engine enables all those involved in patients’ health decisions, including doctors, caregivers, families and of course the patients themselves, to be better connected. This technology will be integrated with Qualcomm Life’s 2net cloud platform.

The 2net platform also focuses on patients who are being monitored at home, and allows information from biometric devices to be sent straight to the cloud using machine-to-machine communication. With these two technologies being combined, at-home patients will find their medical providers to be better-informed and better-connected to one another.

This could have significant implications in the healthcare industry, where subpar coordination of care is seen as one of the largest hurdles in providing efficient and effective medical services. Miscommunication between various healthcare providers is a direct contributor to the 44,000 to 98,000 deaths caused by medical errors each year.

Rick Valencia, vice president of Qualcomm Life, acknowledged this issue while discussing the acquisition, saying that “we are very well aware of this need for orchestration of care teams in the advent of accountable care and patient-centered medical homes.”

This additional orchestration, however, would not be possible without the use of the cloud. More healthcare organizations are moving toward cloud usage as electronic health records become more commonly used. The switch to the cloud comes as the technology becomes more secure. Whereas before, there were concerns about patients’ records falling into the wrong hands, cloud providers have begun focusing more on security, even conforming to HIPAA regulations to ensure the privacy of patients.

With the cloud technology of Qualcomm Life combined with HealthyCircles’ focus on providing better coordination of care, patients and doctors using the company’s healthcare system will see double the benefits.