Dive Brief:
- Advocate Aurora Health is teaming up with Foxconn Health Technology Business Group with the aim of advancing population health and patient outcomes while reducing costs to patients and employers.
- The collaboration, announced Thursday, will focus on enhancing preventive care and employer-based wellness programs, creating a smart city connectivity infrastructure and investing in precision medicine and genomics.
- The plan also calls for transformational training programs geared toward the needs of future clinical teams.
Dive Insight:
The employer-based project will draw on Foxconn’s predictive modeling platform and artificial intelligence capabilities along with Advocate Aurora’s population health management expertise to forge tools that help employers predict future healthcare costs and improve workforce wellness, the companies said.
The smart city component will connect and display information for patients and doctors across a secure, integrated provider network to promote wellness outside of doctor visits and hospitals to lower costs.
“Our employees’ health is our top priority,” Leonard Wu, CEO of Foxconn Health Technology Business Group, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Advocate Aurora Health not only to bring together two organizations committed to health technology innovations but to provide first class health care and medical services to our Foxconn U.S. employees.”
Population health is hot right now, and the collaboration is yet another example of companies trying to tackle wellness by targeting employer healthcare costs. In January, Amazon, J.P. Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway announced plans to form an independent company to address the healthcare needs of their U.S. employees “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.”
Last month, the three business giants named New Yorker staff writer and Harvard Medical School surgery professor Atul Gawande as CEO of the yet-to-be-named venture. Few details have been provided on the independent, nonprofit company meant to disrupt U.S. employee healthcare.
This is Advocate Aurora Health’s first major partnership since the two health systems merged in April. The combined entity forms the 10th largest U.S. nonprofit integrated health system, with 27 hospitals, more than 500 care delivery sites and annual revenues of about $11 billion.