Regional health system WellSpan Health has entered into a seven-year strategic partnership with Philips to advance advanced imaging technology and co-develop new AI and technology tools across its network.
Philips technology supports WelSpan’s entire network of 12 hospitals, diagnostic imaging centers, and ambulatory surgery centers across central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. The long-term commercial agreement establishes Philips as WellSpan’s preferred vendor across patient monitoring, enterprise informatics, and all applicable imaging modalities, including CT, MR, digital X-ray, ultrasound, and image-guided therapy.
The commercial agreement includes a structured approach to technology lifecycle management, with the organizations saying Welspun and Philips will coordinate equipment, services, training and upgrade plans under a single, coordinated framework.
The partnership marks the first research and innovation collaboration between Philips and a regional health system in the United States. The health tech giant and Welspun will leverage Philips’ R&D pipeline to co-develop entirely new products and capabilities that advance the delivery of care, with Welspun acting as both a proving ground and a co-developer.
The research is expected to examine how artificial intelligence and digital tools are improving throughput, costs and workflow efficiency, the organizations said.
WellSpan President and CEO Roxanna Gapstur, Ph.D., RN, told Fierce Healthcare that the strategic partnership with Philips fits broadly into the health system’s innovation strategy, aligns more deeply with a handful of technology companies and aligns with the WellSpan 2030 strategic plan. In September, WellSpan Health expanded its partnership with General Catalyst to test and expand its artificial intelligence tools. The health system also works with medical technology startups Hippocratic AI and Aidoc, as well as cloud and analytics technology Amazon Web Services.
WellSpan has evolved a technology strategy that focuses on culture and capabilities and deploys AI and technology in an intentional way that goes beyond just pilot projects, said WellSpan’s CEO.
“We’ve been pretty deep into innovation over the last five years to streamline the health care system, make things simpler for patients, and allow them to really personalize their care. Through that, we’ve built some large partnerships, so we’re moving things forward with solutions point by point. “We’ve been working closely with Philips for several years now, and they’ve really come to respect our approach to innovation at Welspun. It’s a culture and capability that really extends across our organization,” Gapster said in an interview.
Gapster noted that most people in the United States receive care in community health systems. Our partnership with Philips is an important step in extending the latest innovative technology and AI tools to community providers.
“To ensure that we can provide the best care to most people in the United States by developing cutting-edge treatments and devices to help these people receive the correct diagnosis. We feel very passionate about this, and Philips agrees. So together, we have innovation and research capabilities and are committed to the same goal of improving care in these communities. We can co-develop new products, whether it’s new workflows, new software, or new imaging methods for patients. We can also research these areas to really study what we’re doing and make sure that what we’re doing is improving outcomes,” she said.
The partnership with Philips puts WelSpan at the forefront of diagnostics and imaging in community healthcare, she said.
“What we’re looking forward to is there may be things that come up within Philips or ideas that we come up with together that we haven’t really tried yet. “On the other hand, most of that kind of work is done in academic medical centers. We think it’s really important that community health systems are part of that whole process,” Gapster said.
Potential areas for future innovation include the use of AI in image processing, AI-enabled workflows, and the use of digital twins to advance image processing and diagnostics, he noted.
“As an example, Philips is working on avatars for patients during scans. Technicians can’t be in the room with patients while they’re being scanned, so having human-like interaction when they’re in the scanner can really help calm people down. So we can bring in AI agents and avatars to calm patients down and really improve that experience,” Gapster said.
The use of AI may also help reduce patient scan times. “We have some exciting ideas about AI-powered care that we think can be a real differentiator. Digital twins could emerge because digital twins are a microcosm of something specific. It could be the human body, it could be logistics. ‘What does your supply chain look like?’ So we’re learning from digital twins how to re-build that and actually improve that process,” she said.
Gapstur added, “We have some initial ideas, but within the next couple of months we’ll be getting the team together to really plan the work for the first year.”
Through its technology partnership with Philips, WellSpan aims to expand access to healthcare, including in rural areas, while reducing pressure on clinical teams through AI and digital tools. The health system has a goal of regaining more than 450,000 working hours in 2026.
WellSpan is focused on simplifying healthcare and personalizing care, and the Philips partnership “addresses both of those head-on in terms of how we want patients to experience the healthcare system,” Gapster said.
“We don’t have 50 partners here at WellSpan. We’ll have two, three or four partners. So we’ve put in place some fairly large platforms that are going to be the primary way we interact with our patients and our teams. Philips is going to be one of those larger platforms,” she said.
