“Work has started on it but we haven’t finalized an official launch date,” Sunil Lalvani, managing director of BlackBerry India, told the Indian news outlet theEconomic Times. “We are running trials with multiple hospitals in India. It includes integration with different hospital information systems as well as various medical equipment.”
The mobile phone maker is teaming up with California healthcare IT company NantHealth, whose clinical operating system connects more than 16,000 medical devices at 250+ hospitals around the globe, according to the Economic Times. The two companies will integrate devices such as scanners, ultrasound machines and electrocardiograms (ECGS). And cloud-based services will enable better use of data and analytics in decision-making.
In addition, the duo aims to kickoff a healthcare centric smart phone as early as the end of the year, according to Global Healthcare. “We do plan to make the device available for all, but it will be optimized for viewing 3D images and CT scans,” Blackberry executive vice president Jim Mackey told the Economics Times in April, upon the announcement that it is purchasing a minority stake in the NantHealth. Blackberry has fallen out of favor in the U.S., but its Z3 smartphone for emerging markets sold out in India within the first two weeks of launch, CEO John Chen said in the Economic Times.
The company’s widely-used QNX operating system will be deployed in the medical devices venture. In July, Blackberry launched a version of the software designed for medical devices and said it complies with International Electrotechnical Commission standards.
REFERENCE: Fierce Medical Devices; 11 SEP 2014; Varun Saxena