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.