Mobile Health Solutions from AT&T ForHealth

Overview

The U.S. healthcare industry is poised for change. Right now, there are people who don't have access to care, people who don't get quality care and people who are paying too much for their healthcare. Solutions are needed to address these challenges.

At AT&T, we believe that technology and smart networks can ultimately create a healthier world.

We understand the various gaps in healthcare today, and have developed solutions to help address them. AT&T ForHealth solutions can help solve these challenges along the entire continuum of care — from acute care settings to home care settings. AT&T ForHealth was created to accelerate the delivery of innovative wireless, cloud-based and networking services and applications to help the healthcare industry improve patient care and reduce costs.

These innovative solutions are focused on improving collaboration among providers, patients and the whole healthcare team — leading to a more integrated approach to healthcare delivery. We believe an integrated care model with fewer opportunities for gaps in coordination will help improve outcomes for everyone who touches the healthcare system. Whether it's our cloud-based solutions, health information exchange, mHealth or telehealth solutions, we're bridging the gaps in healthcare today.

Our team draws upon talent across all of AT&T with experts from each healthcare industry business customer segment that we serve: including hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, suppliers and providers.

mHealth

At AT&T, we define mHealth very broadly — utilizing mobile technologies, devices, machine-to-machine connectivity or applications, to improve on or develop new healthcare solutions that can both help improve patient outcomes. It's not just about the device or an application, but rather the entire ecosystem needed across the device, application, network, developer and operational/support functions needed to enable mobile services that impact the quality of care at scale.

Our mHealth solutions roadmap is divided into two broad categories:

Services to support mobile patient care focused on engagement and care outcomes. Here we focus on helping healthcare institutions and patients manage diseases, take the appropriate medicine, receive home care, manage weight loss, and monitor wellness programs. For example, solutions that can help manage chronic diseases from a smartphone, tools for medication adherence, remote patient monitoring, and wellness and fitness apps.
Enterprise mobilization focused on improving efficiencies and workflow. These solutions are communications tools, infrastructure and services focused on increasing doctor productivity, improving workflow, and delivering integrated and secure mobile management and communication tools. For example, AT&T has launched the mHealth Platform, which is expected to streamline, accelerate and lower costs in the development, deployment and management of enterprise-grade mHealth applications.

AT&T's innovative solutions for healthcare have garnered industry recognition. Frost and Sullivan presented AT&T with the 2011 Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for its approach to mHealth, recognizing the company's work with mobile communication devices in the remote healthcare environment and strategic collaboration as key factors in an effective strategy.

Telehealth

Networked healthcare solutions are helping extend the reach of healthcare professionals. They are enabling patients to receive in many cases as close to in-person care as possible from a remote location, such as their home or a remote clinic.

Telehealth solutions make access to personalized care much more possible than traditional delivery of care in a doctor's office or hospital — allowing providers and patients to interact remotely makes improved access to care possible and the likelihood of timely interventions much more possible without the restrictions of physical barriers to care such as transportation, local specialty and academic care.

AT&T's telehealth solution set is called AT&T Virtual Care. This set expands the number of patients that can be cared for by extending clinicians' reach outside the four walls of the hospital or clinic. AT&T Virtual Care delivers powerful telehealth solutions combining network resources, video and audio conferencing technology, medical devices, and clinical integration to provide virtual visits between physicians and patients.

Cloud-Based Healthcare

In order to be truly effective, a cloud-based solution needs to meet security requirements, enable remote viewing of diagnostic quality images, and be able to bridge disparate silos of data. The benefits of an effective solution are great-- not only can it foster mobility for physicians and simplify access to images for hospitals and health networks, but it can also help enable better patient outcomes.

AT&T is delivering a set of cloud-based, medical image archive applications and security services that will give healthcare providers highly-secure access to clinical data in near real-time, scaled to handle the huge bandwidth demands driven by live video, images and medical records.

Our cloud-based solution, AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management, makes medical images available in real time, and from virtually anywhere. This allows providers to make clinical decisions even when they are outside of a medical facility. The solution helps healthcare providers to store, access, view and share patient medical images such as X-rays and CT or MRI scans from virtually anywhere over a highly-secure infrastructure.

Healthcare Community Online

A Health Information Exchange (HIE) is the crux of a healthcare system where care is truly connected, coordinated and collaborative.

AT&T Healthcare Community Online is a complete care coordination and care collaboration platform, accessible by providers, caregivers and patients. It has the ability to aggregate patient information from disparate data sources, and make it available via single sign on access at the point of care.

HCO provides the foundation for a fully clinically-integrated system. This industry leading cloud-based service permits providers within a healthcare system to easily exchange health information and share applications in a highly-secure manner. The collaborative care and HIE platform can help to reduce or eliminate duplicate tests and unnecessary costs, enable providers to comply with requirements for use of electronic health records and enhance clinical workflow, ultimately improving the quality of care for patients. All of AT&T's offers will be available as stand-alone networking solutions or can potentially be compatible with HCO.

The American Hospital Association (AHA) has exclusively endorsed AT&T's HIE services, recognizing the strength of HCO and other voice, data networking and wireless services that AT&T provides to enable healthcare industry participants to easily exchange health information and applications.

Innovation

It's an exciting time in the healthcare world. Innovation and collaboration are driving change forward to create a more complete, accessible, and personalized healthcare experience.

The path to healthcare transformation requires facilitating innovation in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of patient care. Because technology can transform an innovative idea into a reality, technology will be a key enabler in driving this much needed transformation. In fact, mobile, wireless devices have already changed our lives as consumers. And they are going to change our lives as patients even more in the future — and for the better.

Innovation matters at AT&T and is part of our culture, part of our very DNA. We're increasing the velocity of innovation through openness and interoperability.

Whether it's developing groundbreaking technology in the AT&T Labs, fostering a hub for brilliant minds to connect via the AT&T Foundry^®, or gathering start-ups for an mHealth Hackathon, we're looking for new and unique ways to transform healthcare delivery and get new capabilities to our customers faster.

The AT&T Foundry^® is a core component of AT&T's strategy to drive innovation, building on the resources of AT&T Labs and AT&T's crowdsourcing platform, The Innovation Pipeline. The AT&T Foundry^® utilizes an agile development and prototyping process that can speed projects from concept to market three times faster than typically possible — sometimes months instead of years. We have three collaborative workspaces in Silicon Valley, North Texas and Israel to support innovators who have great ideas but few resources.
AT&T Labs are home to some of the world's best scientists and engineers, who focus their research capabilities and expertise on our network and the applications, devices and platforms that run on our network. We trace our heritage back more than a century ago to Alexander Graham Bell's historic phone call to Watson that marked the beginning of a new voice communications era. Today, AT&T Labs continues this great tradition of innovation across a broad spectrum of technology, including IP network management, next-generation text-to-speech products and much more.

The AT&T mHealth Platform, which lets developers rapidly launch apps that can securely share data from mobile blood-pressure, weight, sleep or other personal monitors, was cultivated through a collaboration of major innovation initiatives including the AT&T Foundry^® and the AT&T Developer Program. Together, these initiatives applied research and expertise in the healthcare space while speeding an idea to market in just months by dedicating resources to the project and enhancing collaboration between AT&T and third party developers.