Verizon Business targets health care

Verizon Business (NYSE:VZ) today announced two managed security services designed specifically for the health care industry, to aid in protecting the confidentiality of electronic medical records. The two new services are part of a new health care practice at Verizon Business that is designed to develop new services and tailor existing ones to meet the specific needs of this major market segment, said Barry Zipp, director of Verizon Connected Health Care Solutions.

“Part of [the new practice] is an improved value proposition,” Zipp said. “Instead of saying we can sell you this product, we will show how this product can be used for this clinical application. In other words, we are taking a business-needs approach. We may be selling some of the same services, but we walk about those services in the language of the health care professional, not a product expert. We are also changing the way we work with our healthcare clients, knowing their business better and getting to the people who are making the clinical decisions. I'm talking about the chief medical officer or the chief medical information officer or the head of cardiology or the head of nursing. Those are people who are highly influential in making technology decisions. They may not control the purse strings but they are the ones for whom the technology is being purchased."

The two new services include Verizon Security Management Program-Health Care (SMP-H), which will proactively assess the strength of existing security practices to determine if they meet federal and industry-specific security guidelines such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). The assessment can be done through an online dashboard that is designed to be easy to use.

The second new service offers IT consulting to assist health care providers in setting up security that protects the sharing and storage of patient data, including credentialing, certification, and assessment and validation services. Verizon Business will have security experts qualified to certify that a health care company’s electronic information systems meet the standards set by the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), a consortium of health care, business, technology and information security firms, Zipp said.

Federal stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is available to improve health care IT, which has lagged other industries, Zipp said. Part of that process is creating electronic medical records to replace paper records both for efficiency and for sharing of information, but once electronic records are created, there is the need for better security to protect sensitive patient data, Zipp added.

The new Verizon Connected Health Care Solutions practice will increase Verizon’s visibility in the industry, which already represents a major source of revenue, Zipp said.

“This is not us getting started in health care – that is already a multi-billion dollar practice,” Zipp said. “Verizon serves hundreds of hospitals and tens of thousands of medical practices. But this is an effort to unify the company’s strategy for healthcare so we are thinking at an industry level, not a product-category level.”

Separately, Verizon Business today also announced that Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn has hired Verizon to do a comprehensive review of its network infrastructure to make sure that the center is meeting patient data privacy requirements.