Verizon packages up tele-health collaboration

Verizon today introduced a set of new health care managed services to enable long-distance video consultations along with other types of audio and video collaboration.

Verizon Telehealth Collaboration Services targets three main sectors of the health-care value chain: clinical collaboration between doctors and patients; video-based education and training of medical professionals; and video meetings for health-care administrators to reduce travel costs, said Nancy Green, managing principle-health care for Verizon.

Verizon formally created its Verizon Connected Health Care vertical consultancy and managed services group back in January. Since then, it has introduced a number of services, including two security-focused health services earlier this summer.

Today, the Verizon health team encompasses 500 sales people and 12 business staff – such as solution architects and business development executives -- specifically targeting health care opportunities, said Green, who herself joined the team just four months ago after 16 years of selling health care solutions. The group is working closely with the medical industry to determine its tele-health needs and build services to meet them – beyond typical carrier voice and data offerings, said Green.

All told, Verizon provides health-care related services to more than 17,000 enterprise customers – representing about 90% of Fortune 100 health care companies.

The new video collaboration services are especially suited to rural and remote tele-health applications, such as “tele-stroke,” which involves having a specialist review a patient’s case via a live video session to determine if they can wait for that doctor to arrive or require immediate attention. Coupled with remote patient monitoring of vitals, video collaboration can vastly help remote hospitals improve their service, Green said, noting that 10% of physicians practice in rural areas and 25% of the U.S. population lives there.

“Access to specialist care is the biggest driver of collaboration, along with controlling the costs of patient encounters,” she said.

For its collaboration services, Verizon will bundle together videoconferencing systems from a variety vendors – depending on the hospital’s needs, Green said. Such systems could range from large, room-sized systems to smaller laptop-based solutions that drive collaboration deeper into clinical environment, she said.

Over the next year, Verizon Connected Health Care will roll out additional solutions, but also focus on moving more of its services and capabilities into the network “cloud” – offering them as true managed services versus applications that run on the customer premises, Green said. In particular, hospitals have a lot to gain by better connecting with other hospitals via wide area links, but that brings up questions of security and privacy.

“The industry is moving toward lets tie my secure network to your secure network, but I really don’t want you in my network,” Green said. “When we get to things like hosting in the cloud, that’s when tele-health will really explode. That makes it very easy to connect disparate applications.”

Also coming are even more mobile capabilities, including taking video collaboration down to the mobile device. For instance, Verizon is already working with a hospital in New Jersey, Green said, that is building a collaboration service with mobile endpoints, allowing specialists to do consultations from almost anywhere.