At the Forbes Healthcare Summit 2014 BlackBerry CEO John Chen and NantHealth CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong revealed NantHealth’s new app that will allow doctors to view genomes via a secure phone, like the Blackberry Passport. According to Crackberry, BlackBerry surprised everyone by investing in NantHealth in April but John Chen noted that investments in companies such as NantHealth were a part of BlackBerry’s future plans due to the unique advantages they have in the healthcare industry:
The future of BlackBerry lies in creative opportunities like this that take our many core disciplines and combine them in ways no one else can match. Healthcare is one of the key industries in which we have unique advantages and this investment reflects our commitment to maximize our opportunities there.
During an interview with Forbes Media Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes, John Chen gave a description of the Blackberry Passport, a much wider phone than we are used to (it has the exact same size as a physical passport) that is highly secure and able to handle large amounts of data. Later, Patrick Soon-Shiong held up the phone as it loaded an analysis of a sample genome from the cloud.
NantHealth aims to focus on selling hospital systems on a system that will connect all of their devices and records together to create real-time dashboards for administrators and doctors. When asked about when NantHealth would go public, Soon-Shiong first announced that it would happen “this year” and then talked about the charitable trust he will be creating. But later he confirmed backstage that by “this year” he actually meant 2015. ”I’m already in next year,” he laughed.
Soon-Shiong tweeted earlier that he was excited about an upcoming joint announcement with BlackBerry but he didn’t elaborate on the matter. Now we do know what it was all about. However, we will learn more about this on Sunday during a 60 Minutes broadcast with a full announcement arriving at CES in Las Vegas.