Verizon Hopes To Be Secure Healthcare Network For All

If you’re like me, you might be wondering how carriers are  looking at their role in the healthcare business — and whether some of their talk about mHealth is just noise.  (I’ve always seen mHealth as a space ripe to be be dominated by applications developers and device manufacturers, not carriers.)

To get my head straight, I recently had a conversation with Dr. Peter Tippett, chief medical officer and vice president of Verizon Connected Health Care. In it, he changed my view of what Verizon is doing in mHealth, and moreover,  what ground Verizon specifically hopes to own in healthcare over the next several years.

When I think Verizon I think switches and routers and cables, not consumer-facing applications and medical devices. And before I talked to Dr. Tippett, I assumed that Verizon’s main healthcare efforts likely involved going head to head with other wireless/wireline connectivity players for connectivity business in some form.

Well, think again.  Verizon’s Connected Health Division, says Tippett, is aiming to set the bar much higher.

“The question is, ‘what happens after wireless data?’,” Dr. Tippett said. “This isn’t a two month plan, this is a strategic extension of Verizon to transform the healthcare industry using our huge capability around the world.”

On the more immediate front, Verizon has mHealth technology under development which, to my mind, would solve a difficult problem.  For five years, he says, Verizon has been developing a new mHealtlh platform which will tie together data from testing devices like blood pressure cuffs, weight scales and EKGs into an analytics engine that makes sense of it all.

“No doctor wants four glucoses a day from 1,000 patients,” Dr. Tippett says. “Just mobilizing the data isn’t enough. You’ve got to create a cloud service that can do big data analytics on it and normalize the data, then trigger the alerts to the right people — including patients.”

I’m going to keep my eye on the mHealth platform, which definitely intrigues me.

But the really big play for Verizon in this space seems to be in HIPAA-secure data hosting and exchange.  Verizon already has a massive presence around hosting, app management, security, identity management and the cloud, having added Cybertrust and Terramark (enterprise hosting) to build up its lineup.

Verizon now offers secure data sharing on multiple levels:

*  A “medical data exchange” — not unlike the exchange banks use to pass transactions back and forth — allowing any member to share information using Verizon’s security services.

* An exchange “identity layer” which is secure enough to allow Schedule 2 drugs to be prescribed. According to Dr. Tippett, 40 percent of doctors in the U.S. are already using it.

* A global network of highly-secured data centers.

Members of the medical ecosystem who use secure Verizon services can consider their HIPAA compliance and security matters handled, then focus on their core business, Dr. Tippett says. And that can scale to hundreds of millions of users on the network, he notes.

Clearly, this doesn’t sound like the broadband carrier talking — these folks are out to take business from players as diverse as Verisign, IBM and the database giants.  It makes sense to me, on the surface, but in any grand vision there are holes to be picked.

You tell me:  Does Verizon sound like it’s positioned right to become the default secure healthcare backbone?

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

6 Comments

  • Good summary of the benefits and challenges John. I spoke with Sonya Hughes, Accentus-Inc, recently on this exact topic. Her 2 cents:
    1. Creating, updating and managing templates takes lots of time to do it well. And it must be done well.
    2. Some dictation and transcription will remain and should be integrated within the EMR. When practices insist on 100% compliance with template-based documentation, productivity drops. Trouble spots for template-based documentation are complicated patient histories (especially injuries), initial assessments, specific plans and second opinion consultations (especially post-operative complications and followup).
    3. Historical patient information upload / abstracting is an essential step. Takes 20 minutes per patient to upload historical information into EMR prior to first office visit. Budget for this task!

  • Nice ideas from Verizon, but in dealing with the firm and its predecessors over the years (in New York downstate), I’ve found that their sometimes great ideas are badly overshadowed by some of the worst customer service – retail and commercial, that I’ve ever seen. Working in banks needing numerous comms lines for data feeds, I’ve found too many Verizon divisions competing with each other, no straight answer to any question, no ‘the buck stops here’, multi month delays in getting lines installed, with further long delays actually getting them working, horrific billing and worse. If they want us to take their technology seriously, they’ve got to do something, IMHO, about their service levels.

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