Philips acquires Blue Willow senior living platform

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – Royal Philips, a global leader in healthcare technology, announced that it has acquired Vancouver-based Blue Willow Systems, a developer of a next-generation, cloud-based senior living community resident safety platform.

Blue Willow Systems complements Philips’ existing CarePoint 6.0 senior living platform by providing the company’s customers with new solutions for resident and staff management with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, and added functionality such as Bluetooth-enabled wearable devices and access points, real-time location tracking and enterprise reporting.

These solutions will ultimately link the home, senior living communities and healthcare organizations, helping residents and their families along the aging journey. They are designed to enhance the quality of care and the operational performance of care providers seeking to optimize population health. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

To further enhance its Senior Living resident safety portfolio, Philips has teamed up with Inovonics, an industry leader in high-performance wireless sensor networks for life-safety applications. Inovonics is the provider of the most widely used sensors and monitoring devices in senior living communities in North America.

As a result of this collaboration, Philips’ CarePoint 6.0 platform is now capable of monitoring Inovonics’ devices as well as Philips’ market-leading Lifeline devices, offering senior living communities optimal flexibility in resident safety system design.

“Philips has long been committed to supporting seniors along the aging journey, their caregiving families, and our senior living community partners,” said Ripley Martin, business leader of Philips Aging & Caregiving. “To enhance the quality of care and cope with rising demand, senior living communities are increasingly seeking to modernize their infrastructure, participate in more care settings, and better support residents through data.

“The addition of Blue Willow Systems and the collaboration with Inovonics position Philips as the enterprise partner of choice to support our customers with their transformation from analog to digital caregiving operations,” Martin said.

Blue Willow Systems’ resident safety platform manages resident wandering with personalized wander boundaries, automatically detects falls, analyzes real-time resident and staff activity, and automatically sends event alerts to both mobile and desktop devices.

The platform provides sophisticated incident and trend reports allowing operators to deliver better care, manage staff workflow and mitigate risk, resulting in increased staff productivity and resident and family satisfaction.