Samsung Electronics bought digital health platform Xealth to push deeper into healthcare. The acquisition will bolster the company's efforts to integrate data from its wearables and devices into clinical workflows and electronic medical records.
"The synergy between Samsung’s advanced wearable technology and Xealth’s digital health platform can create a link between home health monitoring and clinical decision-making through enhancements to Xealth’s platform, with the provider-patient relationship at the center of that effort," the company said in a press release.
Samsung has built a diverse portfolio of products to monitor and track health at home, including smartwatches and rings. The acquisition of Xealth will be a cornerstone of Samsung’s "care at home vision of connecting and bridging wellness and medical care," executives said.
As wearables continue to gain clinical validation, Xealth's digital health platform and health system network could be a key part of Samsung's future healthcare strategy.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Xealth will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, Mike McSherry, CEO of Xealth, told Fierce Healthcare. McSherry will stay on as CEO. Samsung previously invested in Xealth.
Xealth, a Fierce 15 of 2023 honoree, was spun out of the Providence health system in 2017 and provides a platform that enables health systems to deploy, integrate and manage digital health tools. Providers can prescribe and monitor digital health content, apps, and services as easily as they would medications.
The acquisition gives Samsung direct access to a large network of hospitals. Xealth works with more than 30 large health systems and 500 hospitals, and it integrates more than 80 digital health solutions, according to McSherry.
The company's health system customers include Allina Health, Atrium Health, Mass General Brigham, Advocate Health, UPMC and Duke Health, among others. Xealth's vendor partners include digital health and digital therapeutics companies like Omada Health and NeuroFlow, along with companies for care pathways like Twistle and remote patient monitoring companies such as Cadence and Rimidi. Xealth also brings that device data back into the health systems' clinical workflow.
The company also manages digital non-clinical services like Uber rides and meal service delivery for patients, McSherry said.
"We believe the acquisition of Xealth, with its accumulated expertise and extensive healthcare network, will be an anchor to accelerate Samsung’s efforts to support health systems and digital health partners through a truly connected care," TM Roh, President and Acting Head of the Device eXperience Division at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement.
McSherry is bullish on future growth in wearables and at-home monitoring and sees big opportunities to integrate this data more into clinical care.
"I think wearables bring a tremendous value in both people monitoring and managing their own health as well as the remote monitoring and quarterbacking of hospital systems and providers to give the notice and oversight and interventions as necessary. This is a great step in the right direction for U.S. healthcare," said.
Customer health data from wearables can fill in context that is missing to hospitals and bring more data analysis possibilities that were not available just with clinical records, he noted.
Working with Samsung and its hospital network, Xealth can "design a bridge between home health monitoring and clinical decision-making, with provider workflow considerations and patient engagement at the core of that effort," he said in a statement.
McSherry co-founded Boost Mobile and was the CEO of Swype, which was sold to Nuance in 2011. Several former members of the Swype team joined McSherry as entrepreneurs-in-residence at Providence, where Xealth was developed.
"I would argue that we are the best technical and business model team in the world at understanding mobile businesses and mobile technology and digital health," he said.
With Samsung's resources, Xealth plans to continue growing its team and adding more customers, McSherry said. Xealth also has aspirations to expand its business into international markets, he noted.
"We're working with several hospital systems to introduce some of Samsung's wearable devices into clinical care protocols, things like their Afib detection and sleep apnea detection and hospital systems validating data that is valuable to remotely monitor using these more lightweight wearable sensors than the traditional heavier diagnostic devices," he said.
Wearable technology is making big inroads. About 44% of U.S. adults own wearable health tracking devices, such as smartwatches or smart rings, to track health metrics from sleep to heartbeat patterns, according to the 2023 Rock Health Digital Health Consumer Adoption Survey.
But integrating this data into clinical care and making it useful for providers and hospitals has been a challenge.
"People go to their doctor and say, 'Look at my watch. Look what it says.' Or they produce some PDF and say, 'Hey, doctor, look at this.' It's just so asynchronous and ad hoc and unstructured that it's not a good experience," McSherry said.
Apple developed HealthKit to incorporate feeds from health and wellness data from third-party devices and apps.
"I don't think that [Apple HealthKit] had the clinical traction or success that people might have assumed. I think Samsung took some observations of why that wasn't successful, and they said something that had deeper integration capabilities, did more processing, was built deeper into the clinical workflow to create the rules and observations and alerting and signaling when the care teams want it, not just when the device wants to shove it back into the EHR. I think Samsung saw us as enablement for them to bring their device ecosystem deeper into clinical workflows," McSherry said.
Samsung's acquisition of Xealth also comes as other major retailers are moving away from healthcare. Best Buy divested Current Health, a care-at-home platform, while Walmart shut down its Walmart Health division and its telehealth services. Microsoft made an unsuccessful foray into personal medical records.
"Samsung respectfully understood our deep relationships with the providers, understood how clinical workflow and hospital system and physician adoption is crucial, and that's why Samsung saw us, with our deep workflow and integration and relationships with providers, was going to be a respectful way to enter healthcare and do so in a in a gradual and meaningful way in how they are attempting to play a significant role in healthcare," McSherry said.
Samsung has been clear about its ambitions in home healthcare. The consumer electronics giant provides digital health solutions for healthcare organizations, including through mobile devices and tablets. Samsung sees opportunities for the use of its technology in healthcare, especially to help aging seniors live healthy at home, said Hon Pak, M.D., former chief medical officer at Samsung Electronics, back in 2022.
Two years ago, the company announced a slew of digital health and wellness projects it’s conducting alongside Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Tulane University School of Medicine and others.
Samsung products, from TVs to refrigerators to smartwatches, are in a significant number of U.S. homes.
"Over the next 10 to 20 years, they want to play a significant role in home health. With that as their aspirational future, they thought, 'Hey, we are the most connected player in the home. How do we bridge that into healthcare?' That's a multi-decade-long journey," McSherry said. "Given that wearables are in their nascent clinical validation right now, I think they saw Xealth would be a bridge for bringing these wearables directly into the clinical environments. But in the future, if you imagine transitions of care from hospital systems or inpatient clinical environments to remotely monitoring and managing and recovering, Samsung stands to reason to have a strong ecosystem play with their device connectivity."
Samsung's move to expand further into healthcare also comes as federal health officials have signaled an interest in wearable technologies.
Last month, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a House committee he wants Americans to embrace consumer-facing health technology. “We think wearables are key to the MAHA agenda. My vision is every American is wearing a wearable in four years,” he told lawmakers.
RFK Jr. also posted on X that the agency is "launching one of the largest HHS campaigns in history to encourage their use—so every American can take control of their health, one data point at a time."