Thursday, November 4, 2010
AT&T ForHealth
AT&T just announced its entry into the healthcare technology sector with its new ForHealth Division. The company is interested in providing data centers and hosting technology to accomodate the predicted increase in data sharing among doctors, hospitals and labs as electronic health records become standardized. The company also plans to leverage its position in the smartphone market by developing mobile health apps for the iPhone which would track diet and exercise. I can’t say that I’m too optimistic for AT&T in app world since there is so much existing competition from smaller, more agile developers. However, if AT&T can line up the right partners (I'm thinking GE), it could do very well. In addition, if I were AT&T, I would be throwing huge amounts of resources into developing secure cloud-based technology solutions, but I suspect they are probably already doing that. Since healthcare isn’t my specialty, I’d be interested to hear from the healthcare groups.
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This is a really interesting story. One of the biggest challenges facing the electronic medical record business is the lack of interoperability. While each vendor wants to have their own proprietary platform, this minimizes the impact for potential network effects.
ReplyDeleteI have a somewhat different opinion on who AT&T could partner with to make their product most meaningful and successful. Products including Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault are developing Personal Health Records (PHRs) which ideally would / will / can link to health providers' Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). If AT&T searches for the edge, they may find that their real opportunity is to empower consumers (individual mobile phone users) to bring their complete medical record with them.
Earlier this week, Dr. Halamka, the CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center blogged about his prediction that AT&T and Verizon Wireless would come out with products like what AT&T has just announced. The concept of an "electronic medical home" would consolidate records from a variety of sources into a single place.