Advocate Aurora Health and Foxconn to team up
Companies collaborate to develop new technology
Advocate Aurora Health and Foxconn Health Technology Business Group plan to work together to develop new services and products for health care.
The two organizations — one the 10th largest nonprofit health system in the country, the other one of the world’s largest technology companies — envision collaborating in areas such as managing the health of employees, analytics and artificial intelligence.
Charlie Alvarez, vice presidentNorth America of the Foxconn Health Technology Business Group, likens Advocate Aurora Health to “a living lab” for new products and services.
Advocate Aurora Health and Foxconn don’t have a formal agreement but have signed a memorandum of understanding to work together.
“We are starting to have these conversations and have these meetings,” Alvarez said
Wellness programs for employees could be an initial focus.
“We do a really good job of managing our employees’ health care and making it easy for them to be able to track their health and wellness,” Alvarez said.
Foxconn has more than 1 million employees.
The company uses various platforms, including mobile apps, health measurement/assessment kiosks and remote blood pressure meters and weight scales, to collect health information from its employees, according to a document on its website.
That information is accessible through its digital platform — health to you, or h2u — to employees and health
care professionals.
Advocate Aurora Health also has experience in managing the health of specific populations of patients.
For example, before its merger this year with Aurora Health Care, Advocate Health Care Network ranked second in the country, out of 432 accountable care organizations, for its performance in a Medicare program in which hospitals and physicians share in the savings when they provide care at a lower cost while meeting quality measures for a specific group of patients.
Artificial intelligence and precision medicine
Advocate Aurora Health and Foxconn also plan to collaborate on developing software for analyzing health information to identify people who are at risk of developing medical conditions, such as diabetes or high blood pressure.
Artificial intelligence and precision medicine — two fields in which Foxconn is doing research — also could be future areas of collaboration. And Alvarez said Foxconn is making and selling products in Asia that it could bring to the U.S. market.
Numerous companies provide similar applications, software and services as those on which Advocate Aurora Health and Foxconn plan to work together. And what shape the collaboration takes hasn’t been determined.
“That amount of detail is still up in the air,” Alvarez said.
But Rick Klein, chief business development officer of Advocate Aurora Health, said the collaboration eventually could result in joint ventures or partnerships. The collaboration creates a tie between the largest health system in Illinois and Wisconsin and a company that plans to build a $10 billion factory that eventually could employ 13,000 people.
In May, Advocate Aurora Health announced plans to build a $250 million hospital and medical office building in Mount Pleasant, site of the future Foxconn plant, and to open several new clinics in the Racine area.
The planned collaboration could also lead to other agreements in which Advocate Aurora Health would provide health care to Foxconn’s future employees and their family members.