Broadband and cable TV provider, Cox Communications and Cleveland Clinic have announce the formation of Vivre Health, a strategic alliance to bring world-class healthcare to the home through innovative telehealth and home health solutions.
The joint venture will help further increase Cox’s market footprint by expanding into healthcare to provide remote patient monitoring, telehealth visits and other in-home monitoring and treatment services via broadband. The cable TV provider already provides Internet and other broadband services to hospitals. Ultimately, this approach would help reduce costly in-person visits to physicians and providers.
“Fueled by access to broadband, we believe the home will be an increasingly important node within the healthcare delivery architecture and Vivre Health is uniquely positioned to help drive this transformation,” saidAsheesh Saksena, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, Cox Communications.
Cox Communications also has recently invested in HealthSpot, a provider of patient and provider driven telehealth technology. HealthSpot has built a comprehensive healthcare delivery platform that combines cloud-based software with their award-winning HealthSpot station, digital medical devices and mobile applications. The telemedicine kiosks is already being piloted across several states by leading healthcare, pharmacy and retail services providers such as Rite Aid, Florida Blue, etc.
Cox is the third-largest U.S. cable TV company and currently serves approximately 6 million residences and businesses. Cox recently committed to deliver residential Gigabit Internet speeds to all markets it serves by the end of 2016. Cox is not the first broadband provider to express interest in telehealth, both Comcast and Time Warner introduced their own telehealth and video conferencing services for in-home health.
