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Qualcomm Life announced that it has acquired HealthyCircles to provide doctors with a link to data from electronic health records as well as biometric medical devices.
The May 5 announcement aligns the HealthyCircles Software as a Service Care Orchestration Engine with Qualcomm Life’s 2net cloud health monitoring platform. The 2net service allows caregivers to view biometric data from patients’ medical devices to aid home health monitoring. The 2net platform enables machine-to-machine (M2M) communication between the biometric devices and the cloud platform.
Qualcomm Life is a wireless health subsidiary of Qualcomm. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
The SaaS Care Orchestration Engine is a toolset that connects doctors, patients and families as part of the patient-centered medical home model of care, a system that coordinates all participants in a patient’s care community.
Coordination of care is the objective of accountable care organizations (ACOs), in which providers group together to be accountable for quality of care and seek reimbursement for patient outcomes rather than rely on a fee-for-service model.
Dr. James Mault, a founder of HealthyCircles and a developer of Microsoft HealthVault, will join Qualcomm Life as vice president and chief medical officer.
“Our expertise is in facilitating the sharing of data across stakeholders to drive better outcomes at lower costs,” Mault said in a statement regarding HealthyCircles, which enables care transitions from the hospital to the home, Qualcomm Life noted.
The acquisition of HealthyCircles nearly doubles the size of Qualcomm Life, according to Rick Valencia, vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Life.
“This was just as much a talent acquisition as a product acquisition,” Valencia told eWEEK.
Qualcomm Life made the announcement at the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) 2013 conference in Austin, Texas, on May 5. At the show, Qualcomm Life will demonstrate how HealthyCircles and 17 other collaborators integrate with 2net, which the company launched in December 2011.
On March 6, Qualcomm Life announced that the 2net platform would integrate with HealthyCircles, and now the company revealed that it would purchase the company.
By acquiring HealthyCircles’ Care Orchestration Engine, Qualcomm Life was looking to fill a gap in the health care industry regarding “orchestrating” care teams, Valencia said.
“We have known of HealthyCircles for a year and a half, and so we are very well aware of this need for orchestration of care teams in the advent of accountable care and patient-centered medical homes,” Valencia said. “The Orchestration Engine is really orchestrating the connections between a lot of the relevant caregivers.”
The Orchestration Engine could allow a team consisting of a physical therapist, home health nurse, dietician and pharmacist to coordinate patient care, Mault told MobiHealthNews.
Software developers can use the HealthyCircles service-oriented Care Orchestration Engine to scale new apps that enable collaborative care. The toolset allows developers to enhance integration points and data capture sources and speed up time to market for biometric wireless devices, Qualcomm Life reported.
“What we’re going to do is provide a platform for which someone who has a chronic disease management solution can quickly or easily help an ACO, a hospital or a doctor’s office to deliver care to that individual,” Valencia said.
HealthyCircles will allow members of a care team to better coordinate care by gaining access to biometric device on 2net along with medication history, ACO records, lab results and data from clinical trials, Qualcomm Life reported in a Q&A on its Web site.