Seeking to offer two-way medical record access and collaboration and increased control to patients, AT&T (News - Alert), Covisint and Microsoft have announced a major eHealth to enhance the healthcare experience for patients and practitioners alike.

 

AT&T Healthcare Community Online is founded on two AT&T patents and is a virtual private network-based portal. These are the two AT&T patents that enable electronic healthcare data exchange among existing systems of healthcare providers and physicians. By providing doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, labs and patients with access to test results, prescription records, best practices and medical histories, AT&T officials say the Healthcare Community Online offers managed services, applications and authentication services, and promotes the widespread adoption of health-information technology.

 

The new eHealth information exchange is expected to reduce costs and improve the quality of care. Using Microsoft (News - Alert) HealthVault, a software- and service-based platform, customers can store and access personal health information and share information with all physicians and healthcare providers connected to AT&T Healthcare Community Online, officials say.

 

The new eHealth information exchange shares information electronically and in a security-enhanced way across the continuum of care, and is enabled by Covisint’s On-Demand Healthcare Platform and layered on AT&T’s patented eHealth solutions and Multiprotocol Label Switching network, they say.

 

The new exchange platform is designed to enable applications such as uploading of data from home health devices like blood pressure meters, streamlining clinical and administrative processes. offering clinical messaging among healthcare providers, prescribing pharmaceuticals online (also known as “ePrescribing”), and sharing high-density images, including X-rays, MRIs and CT scans.

 

This scalable platform can be rapidly deployed to large and small health-information exchanges as a hosted and managed service by subscribers to AT&T Healthcare Community Online, company officials say. Also, Covisint’s platform can be merged with AT&T’s connectivity offerings to quickly establish high-speed Internet and VPN connectivity to the extended healthcare community.

 

“Through our cooperative efforts with AT&T and Covisint, we are giving consumers the opportunity to make informed choices regarding their health and the health of their families by putting them in more control of their personal health information,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group.