Persistent Systems to Team on New Industrywide Digital Platform for Clinical Care

Persistent Systems and Partners HealthCare, founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, announced today a strategic collaboration to develop a new industry-wide open-source platform with the goal of bringing digital transformation to clinical care. Persistent will help the digital transformation of clinical care at Partners and, together with Partners, develop an open-source platform to lower the barriers for knowledge exchange across health care providers and enable a new generation of decision support apps in the clinical environment.

This four-year collaboration will bring together the world class clinicians and researchers at Partners HealthCare with Persistent’s innovative healthcare technology and product engineering expertise.

The co-developed digital platform will be based on Substitutable Medical Applications & Reusable Technologies (SMART), an open, standards-based technology platform along with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). The platform will enable provider systems across the country to rapidly and cost effectively deploy industry-leading best practices in clinical care across their ecosystems.

“The collaboration serves as a powerful example of how healthcare visionaries and leaders in technology can create positive disruption. By combining forces with Partners HealthCare to design this platform, we’re striving to bring continuous transformation of the healthcare experience. We’re confident this is just the start” said Sudhir Kulkarni, President of Digital at Persistent Systems.

“Making innovative clinical tools available to our physicians at Partners and across the country relies on strong collaborations between academia and industry,” said Dr. Anne Klibanski, Chief Academic Officer at Partners HealthCare. “The co-development of this platform should yield a new tool that integrates applications directly into the clinical workflow -- ultimately improving patient care.”

Sandy Aronson, Executive Director of IT for Partners Personalized Medicine recognizes that “advances in clinical analytics and machine learning have the potential to drive medical discovery at a pace never seen before but we currently lack the ability to efficiently place resulting breakthroughs in the hands of clinicians. Through this collaboration we will band together with other institutions to extend electronic health record (EHR) ecosystems so that the benefits of this work are quickly and broadly delivered to patients”.