@ HIMSS: AT&T details all-in strategy for healthcare vertical

ORLANDO, Fla. — While some carriers are leveraging their networks in the healthcare space primarily from a machine-to-machine perspective, AT&T Inc. has grouped four main business objectives together as it pursues this vertical.
Under its recently launched AT&T ForHealth division, the operator is focusing on tele-health, cloud-based services, health information exchange and m-health.
“Each one is designed to address or meet a pain point in the healthcare industry,” Randall Porter, assistant VP at AT&T ForHealth, told RCR Wireless News.
“If you look at how the industry is going to evolve around these pain points … we think there’s a real opportunity,” Porter said.
It’s one thing to connect a multitude of devices, but it’s entirely another when mobile operators can provide billing, consulting and operational and commercial support at scale, he added. “We think we can be at the heart of providing those types of solutions.”
AT&T was actively working in the healthcare vertical for decades before it formed AT&T ForHealth last year and it counts more than 100,000 customers throughout the healthcare ecosystem today. Early on, the company realized the need to bring in knowledge from outside experts for each of its health objectives, but it also needs healthcare-specific expertise. In fact, the company is currently seeking to hire a chief medical information officer to embolden its level of expertise across IT and healthcare.
Compared to other verticals like finance, for example, IT investment in the healthcare industry is about one-third that of its counterparts, Porter said.
AT&T continues to seek advice from CIOs in the field on different paths to take, depending on the needs and situations that they grapple with in healthcare every day. Those discussions prompted AT&T to develop its first vendor- and carrier-neutral framework. Although AT&T would love to count each and every customer as one of its own on the network connectivity side, it has its eyes on even greater business opportunities outside that realm.
With the structure and scale that AT&T has in place, Porter said he can leverage the expertise needed to put these deals together while also understanding how a stakeholder can and should deliver new products and services to market.
While the regulatory framework and requirements in healthcare make this vertical an incredibly fast-moving market, Porter is convinced that technology will be the greatest enabler going forward. It’s all about “driving costs out of the industry and driving efficiencies in,” he said.
CIOs in this area recognize that technology, more than anything else, is what they need to improve care and meet new regulations, Porter continued. “They’re also seeing our commitment to actual solutions around pain points.”
AT&T’s four-pronged approach to health
First up in AT&T’s healthcare strategy is tele-health. With advanced video capabilities, AT&T is working to help healthcare professional provide access over a wider region and extend remote services out to rural areas. Tele-health can also be used for triage, emergency medical response and more.
Cloud-based services is essentially anything that AT&T can deliver as a service or application on demand through the cloud. Later this year, AT&T is launching a vendor neutral cloud-based storage system that will enable medical professionals to store and manage all of their images and other records. At least 1 billion images are expected to be taken next year in the healthcare space and most of that data is currently stored on site or off site on server farms. AT&T hopes to streamline and improve that process.
Health information exchange (HIE) is a platform as a service that gives doctors access to all of the applications that they need to manage a facility and work with patients to deliver services and care. The goal of HIE is to connect all of the application providers with their customers and enable medical staff to pull up those systems with all of a patients information in one place. Without HIE, doctors and nurses regularly have to pull up multiple applications to find all of the necessary data on a patient. HIE also provides access through a single sign-on.
For HIE, AT&T has identified 58 applications that are widely used in the market and has integrated those applications with software information providers, Porter said.
Finally, m-health is about the devices and network connectivity. Through m-health, AT&T wants to improve the productivity of physicians and give them greater access to patients’ data when they’re in the home. M-health helps patients manage care while also giving medical staff greater insight into the daily biometrics, activity and behavior of their patients.
“This provides a mobile application and a mobile solution that can connect them real time to those patients,” Porter said.