By using this site, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Accept
Health Works CollectiveHealth Works CollectiveHealth Works Collective
  • Health
    • Mental Health
    Health
    Healthcare organizations are operating on slimmer profit margins than ever. One report in August showed that they are even lower than the beginning of the…
    Show More
    Top News
    stress disorder
    5 Ways To Manage Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
    October 27, 2021
    Medical device classification and development strategies
    Medical device classification and development strategies
    April 5, 2023
    varicose veins
    Varicose Veins Prevention: 3 Lifestyle Changes to Make Right Now
    May 1, 2022
    Latest News
    How Probate Planning Shapes the Future of Your Estate and Family Care
    July 17, 2025
    Beyond Nutrition: Everyday Foods That Support Whole-Body Health
    June 15, 2025
    The Wide-Ranging Benefits of Magnesium Supplements
    June 11, 2025
    The Best Home Remedies for Migraines
    June 5, 2025
  • Policy and Law
    • Global Healthcare
    • Medical Ethics
    Policy and Law
    Get the latest updates about Insurance policies and Laws in the Healthcare industry for different geographical locations.
    Show More
    Top News
    How People Are Taking Advantage of Health Deals in the Recent Recession
    February 5, 2021
    Florida Board of Medicine Declares Arizona Homeopathic Doctor “Very, Very Dangerous”
    October 29, 2018
    6 Ways to Make Sure You’re Detoxing Properly
    July 26, 2018
    Latest News
    How IT and Marketing Teams Can Collaborate to Protect Patient Trust
    July 17, 2025
    How Health Choices and Legal Actions Intersect After an Injury
    July 17, 2025
    How communities and healthcare providers can address slip and fall injuries with legal awareness
    July 17, 2025
    Let Your Lawyer Handle the Work Before You Pay Medical Costs
    July 6, 2025
  • Medical Innovations
  • News
  • Wellness
  • Tech
Search
© 2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Reading: Verizon Announces New Cloud Service For Health Data Exchange
Share
Notification Show More
Font ResizerAa
Health Works CollectiveHealth Works Collective
Font ResizerAa
Search
Follow US
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
© 2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Health Works Collective > eHealth > Verizon Announces New Cloud Service For Health Data Exchange
eHealth

Verizon Announces New Cloud Service For Health Data Exchange

Dan Munro
Dan Munro
Share
9 Min Read
SHARE

Editor’s Note: Dan Munro is a contributing editor to Forbes.  His columns are collected under the heading, “The HealthCare Compass”.

Editor’s Note: Dan Munro is a contributing editor to Forbes.  His columns are collected under the heading, “The HealthCare Compass”.

Last month’s article by Steven Brill in Time magazine (Bitter Pill) brought painful and much needed transparency to the topic of healthcare pricing. The biggest single topic and buzzword at HIMSS13 in New Orleans was unveiled earlier today – interoperability. For the rest of us – that word refers to how the healthcare industry exchanges patient data safely and securely. I’ll provide the cliff notes – it doesn’t. At least not easily. For decades the healthcare IT (HIT) industry has been mired in the politics and profits of getting even basic patient information from point A to point B. In a wild attempt at using all of us as digital Sherpas – even the mighty tech giant Google tried their hand at a patient-facing health record (called Google Health) which they completely shuttered earlier this year.

Without going into the evolutionary history of healthcare IT, it’s easy to understand the complexity surrounding all the failed attempts. The pitched battle around HIT profits makes any data exchange a monumental – some would say impenetrable – gauntlet. In healthcare, patient data is patient ownership and as we learned from Steven Brill – that wildly lucrative chargemaster price has to be applied to something. That something is the patient record. Sharing that record – in any direction – is significant risk for many business and legal reasons. Here are just a few:

More Read

10 Things Hospital Leadership Need to Know About Social Media and Marketing
Digital Analytics 101 for Healthcare Marketers: Local Search Optimization
How Do Hospital CEOs Evolve in Today’s Market?
Mobile Health Around the Globe: mHealth India Plans 2012 – Part I
Hospitals Using Smartphones to Connect and Engage with Patients
  • Over 300 Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors (with salaries and profits aplenty)
  • A combination of structured and unstructured data (with hundreds of proprietary data formats)
  • The need for “trusted” (think ”chain of custody”) data for the safe transfer of clinical risk and legal liability
  • Almost 3 million physicians, nurse practitioners and pharmacists either creating or editing patient data
  • A lmost 6,000 hospitals and over 1,000 healthcare insurance companies nationally (managing and storing the data)
  • Over 300 million (potential) patients and over 1 billion discrete patient events per year
  • No National Patient ID (12-15% of hospital errors are related to patient identification)
  • Regulatory requirements (and penalties) with very real (often individual) consequences
  • Standards that have used the  xkcd model of proliferation – for decades:

It’s easy to see how there’s almost no hope of easy or efficient data exchange here and why paper records and fax machines remain the “lingua franca” for many healthcare professionals – to this day. Earlier this morning, 5 of the larger HIT vendors announced a collaborative effort around data exchange called the commonwell Health Alliance. It’s an encouraging step by some of the larger HIT vendors including McKesson, Cerner, athenahealth, Greenway Medical and Allscripts – but it’s still reliant on a cumbersome workflow – around tightly-coupled data exchange – between a handful of tech-titans – in a community of over 300 vendors (the largest of which – Epic – was noticeably absent).

With their announcement today, Verizon is launching a new private data exchange platform called Secure Universal Messaging Services (SUMS) which is designed to scale quickly – in much the same way that new “apps” scale on the consumer side. In private beta for several months, the solution adds an easy to use service that bridges all the security, regulatory and authentication requirements of healthcare with the elegant simplicity of an email interface. Any legally registered healthcare practitioner (as identified through either the DEA or NPI Registries) can sign-up and use Verizon’s industrial strength security and authentication to safely send messages (with any file-type attachment) to any other registered healthcare practitioner. It’s analogous to GMail – baked specifically for healthcare practitioners. Rather than try – or more likely wait – for tightly coupled data exchange (years of debating, development and legal agreements), Verizon’s new service is modeled with the technical and financial simplicity of GMail. Over time, the idea is to extend the use with tighter data exchange through API’s already under development.

It’s a bold and simple bet. Secure identity management and network authentication of the healthcare practitioner (from a trusted source – at scale) trumps proprietary patient data. Verizon’s delivery advantages around this exact kind of service are significant. First, the scale is truly global and extends from the largest datacenters to the smallest devices. Second is a vendor neutrality that can deftly neutralize any reluctant (or recalcitrant) healthcare IT vendor, and third is a rich history of domain expertise specifically around industrial-strength network security, identity management and authentication (at scale). An early ”beta” user is Avera Health – a regional healthcare delivery network based in South Dakota.

“We’ve only been using the Verizon Beta service for a few days, but in our world we have to communicate with about 75-100 different hospitals across 6 different states. Email is the perfect initial step that makes it bone simple for everyone to safely and securely exchange patient information quickly. Everyone knows how to use email and the Verizon brand gives us the confidence to know that we have a large-scale technology partner that transcends the business-as-usual models and bureaucracies typically designed to protect legacy IT vendors.”
Donald Kosiak, MD, MBA, FACEP, Avera eCare Medical Director

The two analysts I spoke to were equally optimistic:

“Verizon is one of several very large vendors that are moving to become national providers of health information exchange rather than providing technology to community-based providers. Other vendors include Covisint, Epic, RelayHealth, Surescripts and a collaboration of vendors that also announced earlier today at HIMSS [see commonwell Health Alliance here]. Each vendor is seeking to leverage its intellectual property to bypass the laborious work of managing the identities of healthcare providers and patients and to use its market dominance to engineer working interfaces with more EHR vendors. The “network effect” favors vendors that amass market share quickly even if they start by providing a limited set of services. If Verizon can execute on its vision it is well-positioned to come from nowhere and become a significant player in the market.”
Wes Rishel, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner  

“The list of vendors that can actually deliver on a secure and effective communications solution like SUMS is pretty short. For this kind of healthcare-specific solution, a provider needs industrial strength domain expertise to meet big technical challenges – at scale – combined with the resources to position and then sell the solution to what is a very complex and highly fragmented market. The provider also needs to have at least some vendor neutrality and a business commitment that extends to include many different healthcare constituents – specifically the small (or even solo) provider. This makes Verizon’s announcement today really compelling – and timely.”
Amy DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services – Current Analysis, Inc.

Interoperability may be this years buzzword at HIMSS, but Verizon is the only one bringing identity management, authentication and network security (at scale) to the party in New Orleans. It’s both exciting and intriguing to see a BIG mobile health solution arrive at HIMSS but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the one everyone was expecting. In our never ending quest to layer acronyms on tech metaphors maybe next year we’ll see the consumer version as VMail?

UPDATE: Additional coverage by Forbes colleague Matthew Herper here.


Original Post




TAGGED:Health ITHIMSS13
Share This Article
Facebook Copy Link Print
Share

Stay Connected

1.5kFollowersLike
4.5kFollowersFollow
2.8kFollowersPin
136kSubscribersSubscribe

Latest News

Grounded Healing: A Natural Ally for Sustainable Healthcare Systems
How IT and Marketing Teams Can Collaborate to Protect Patient Trust
Global Healthcare Policy & Law
July 17, 2025
paramedics in surgical gloves and masks
How Health Choices and Legal Actions Intersect After an Injury
Health care
July 16, 2025
a woman giving a key
How Probate Planning Shapes the Future of Your Estate and Family Care
Health
July 16, 2025
a woman with kinesio tapes on her back arm
How communities and healthcare providers can address slip and fall injuries with legal awareness
Health care
July 16, 2025

You Might also Like

Social Media

Social Media Networking: Twitter Chat with Sharecare’s Sleep Experts

January 24, 2012
telemedicine
eHealthMobile HealthTechnology

ATA 2013 Market Outlook Session: What’s Slowing Down Telehealth?

May 22, 2013
CardiologyRemote DiagnosticsTechnology

How Big Data Can Be Used To Prevent Fatal Heart Attack

February 16, 2018
Global HealthcareHealth careHealth ReformHospital AdministrationMedical EducationMedical EthicsMedical RecordsNewsPolicy & LawPublic HealthUncategorized

8 Of The Most Bizarre Medical Malpractice Cases Out There

December 11, 2018
Subscribe
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Follow US
© 2008-2025 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
Welcome Back!

Sign in to your account

Username or Email Address
Password

Lost your password?