Verizon and Health Evolution Partners are looking to enable development in real-time care coordination and mobile data services.
Health care IT investor Health Evolution Partners
and Verizon Enterprise Solutions are collaborating to foster innovation in
mobile health, telemedicine and health data management. The partnership, which
both companies announced Feb. 6, will leverage Verizon's IT infrastructure to
spur innovation in the 100 health care IT companies that Health Evolution
Partners invests in.
Health Evolution Partners is
a health care buyout firm that invests in health care organizations, such as
hospitals, physician practices, pharmaceutical manufacturers and medical device
makers.
Verizon and Health Evolution
Partners are looking to encourage real-time care coordination and engage
patients with mobile technology.
Real-time care coordination
with "connected health" could help hospitals and doctors' practices
better manage costs and improve patient care, Verizon reports.
"The next generation of
health IT will not be anchored to a desk," said Dr. David Brailer,
chairman of Health Evolution Partners and a former national coordinator for
health information technology coordinator in the Department of Health and Human
Services. "Clinicians and patients will expect technologies that support
mobility and virtual care."
Health Evolution Partners'
firms will develop products using Verizon's mobile health and cloud platforms.
Meanwhile, Health Evolution Partners will provide guidance as Verizon looks to
get new technologies out of the lab and to market, including identity-management
products.
Future health care
innovation will involve broadband, video and wireless devices along with geo-location
and sensors, said Brailer.
The innovation should
connect multiple layers of an IT infrastructure and allow doctors to access
data in a "much cleaner way," said Brailer.
"Verizon's never been
making a secret of the fact that it's transforming itself from a telephone
company to a technology company," Dr. Peter Tippett, vice president and
chief medical officer of Verizon's health care practice, Connected Healthcare
Solutions, told eWEEK.
Tippett noted that by
selling Cybertrust,
a security services provider, to Verizon in 2007, it prepared him for
developing an innovation incubator. "We've spent almost five years in
quiet mode building a whole lot of capabilities," said Tippett, referring
to application and software as a service (SaaS) products.
With the IT networking
technologies it has developed, Verizon is looking to enable companies to
develop health care IT products in the cloud and mobility rather than sell them
to health care companies directly as products, like electronic health record
(EHR) applications, Tippett explained.
"We intend to provide
things that will enable the whole space," said Tippett.
As for cloud computing and
mobility, "security is the anchor trying to hold that back," said
Tippett.
Verizon will have Health
Evolution Partners' 100 or so health care IT companies to experiment as far as
innovation in cloud computing and mobility.
"I think you look at
this relationship between Verizon and Health Evolution Partners as a big
incubator in the external world, extended to the real world," said Tippett.
Brian T. Horowitz is a freelance technology and health writer as well as a copy editor. Brian has worked on the tech beat since 1996 and covered health care IT and rugged mobile computing for eWEEK since 2010. He has contributed to more than 20 publications, including Computer Shopper, Fast Company, FOXNews.com, More, NYSE Magazine, Parents, ScientificAmerican.com, USA Weekend and Womansday.com, as well as other consumer and trade publications. Brian holds a B.A. from Hofstra University in New York.
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