Advocate Aurora Health and Foxconn Health Technology Business Group plan to embark on a three-part, data-driven collaboration, the organizations said in a joint announcement July 12.
The collaboration will bring together virtual health services from Advocate Aurora Health — formed through the recent merger of Downers Grove, Ill.-based Advocate Health Care and Milwaukee-based Aurora Health — with digital health technologies from Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics company that is slated to open a $10 billion technology plant in Wisconsin in 2020.
Here are the three areas the organizations' collaboration will focus on:
1. Developing employer-based wellness programs to enhance preventive healthcare. The employer-based solution will leverage Foxconn's predictive modeling and artificial intelligence tools and Advocate Aurora Health's experience with population health management.
2. Building the infrastructure for what the organizations call a "smart city," which will involve linking patients' available health, fitness and dietary data across hospital, community and pharmacy environments, among other settings. The concept will use Foxconn's technology to connect and display patients' data on a central provider network.
3. Investing in training programs for emerging clinical disciplines, such as precision medicine and genomics.
The organizations plan to pilot the projects in Racine County, Wis., where Foxconn recently broke ground on its technology plant. In February, Aurora Health Care unveiled plans to construct a $130 million ambulatory surgery center and physician office building roughly 10 miles from Foxconn's plant.
"We are pleased to establish this robust partnership with Advocate Aurora Health with our technology portfolio," Leonard Wu, CEO of Foxconn Health Technology Business Group, said in the joint announcement. "We have utilized some of these same technologies with our own employees and are pleased to adopt them here to enhance health from the workplace to the community."