HIMSS: Flex Expands Digital Health Capabilities with Google Cloud-Built Managed Services

Flex, the Sketch-to-Scale solutions provider that designs and builds intelligent products for a connected world, has expanded its service offerings for the healthcare industry with a new digital health offering. BrightInsight is a secure, managed services solution built on Google Cloud Platform that can aggregate data and deliver real-time insights to optimize the value of connected drug, device or combination products. The company made the announcement ahead of the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, taking place March 5-9 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
 
The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that applying big-data strategies to better inform healthcare-related decision making could generate up to $100 billion in value annually across the U.S. healthcare system. Medical devices today collect massive amounts of data, which creates enormous potential for a rapid feedback loop that can help improve patient care and enhance drug therapy delivery and management. In order to make an impact, the data needs to be aggregated from a myriad of apps and stand-alone devices, as well as analyzed to provide actionable insights. BrightInsight solves these challenges and helps patients and health care professionals, from physicians to medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, to better understand medical device usage and medication adherence, and streamline the product development and certification process.
 
“We saw the need for a secure cloud platform designed to support highly-regulated connected drug delivery and medical devices, going beyond simple connectivity to deliver real-time intelligence and actionable insights,” said Kal Patel, M.D., senior vice president of Digital Health for Flex. “With our 20 years of experience operating in global regulated medical environments, and having deployed more than 75 regulated hardware and software medical products, Flex can combine our cross-industry capabilities to simplify our customers’ digital transformation.”
 
Flex is partnering with Google Cloud to deliver insights through customizable analytics dashboards fueled by Google Cloud’s advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Google Cloud Platform enables BrightInsight to securely store, analyze and gain insights from health information, without pharmaceutical and medical technology customers having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Advanced use cases for BrightInsight may include controlling connected devices, drug dosing, decision support, personalized patient interventions, trend analysis and AI-driven insights.
 
“Google Cloud is committed to leveraging our deep engineering expertise to accelerate innovation in digital healthcare,” said Gregory Moore, M.D., Ph.D., vice president, Healthcare, Google Cloud. “With a partner like Flex, we will enable our customers to develop innovative solutions and leverage machine learning-based analytics that can turn new data sets from wearables, medical devices, therapies and apps into actionable information for patients and providers.”
 
BrightInsight is designed to support CE-marked and FDA-regulated Class I, II and III medical devices, combination products and Software as a Medical Device requirements, enabling automated interventions. Deployed as a managed service, the BrightInsight platform allows pharmaceutical and medical technology companies to accelerate their time to market, reduce the cost of implementation and maintenance across multiple products, and scale for global markets.
 
BrightInsight features foundational capabilities for rapid development and a modular platform architecture to support customization and worldwide implementation. It is built from the ground up to securely manage highly regulated medical device data and personal health information, and Flex has put the people, technology and processes in place to monitor security and threat prevention to meet global compliance standards.
 
BrightInsight eliminates regulatory bottlenecks that can lead to costly delays by offering turnkey regulatory design control and file management of master files with the FDA. This service enables pharmaceutical and medical technology companies to focus on their drug, device or combination product submissions without the burden of documenting the software platform.
 
The platform is built within a robust Quality Management System that is designed for ISO 13485 and HIPAA compliance. Flex is also applying for HITRUST certification.
 
At HIMSS 2018, Flex will showcase the BrightInsight platform at Google Cloud’s booth #9900-A in the Innovation Live showcase.