At the annual World Health Care Congress this week near Washington, D.C., Verizon Communications announced a partnership with Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong's NantWorks. As their first order of business, the two companies will build a system called the Cancer Action Knowledge Network to supply physicians with current cancer treatment protocols at the point of care.
This partnership fits into many of Verizon's corporate goals and strategies. "In order to realize the full disruptive potential of technology, we need holistic approaches to solve these fundamental issues and deliver next-generation healthcare experiences to consumers," Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said at the World Health Care Congress, according to remarks provided to MobiHealthNews.
With this in mind, the telecommunications behemoth a couple of years ago consolidated its $5 billion health IT practice into a unit dubbed Verizon Connected Healthcare Solutions. At the beginning of 2012, the company created Verizon Enterprise Solutions to serve Fortune 500 and mid-size corporations, and installed former Verizon Wireless chief John Stratton as president.
Meantime, at the corporate level, Verizon is looking to rein in healthcare costs for the more than 900,000 employees, retirees and their families the self-insured company provides coverage for.
Kannan Sreedhar, managing director for healthcare in the new Verizon Enterprise Solutions division, sees huge potential for mobile technology to help Verizon and its customers manage costs related to what he calls the "big four" chronic diseases, namely diabetes, congestive heart failure, hypertension and obesity.
As people age, their ailments tend not to exist in isolation. "A significant portion of them have comorbities," Sreedhar says in an interview with MobiHealthNews. Mobile technology helps involve patients as part of care teams to address complicated, expensive-to-treat conditions. "Make the patient the center of the care, along with their extended family," he says.
Mobile health can help establish care management protocols for individual patients. "Having sensors is not sufficient," Sreedhar says. The data need to be analyzed and acted upon. "This provides an opportunity for coordination of care," he adds.
To Sreedhar, mobile health is but one component of what Verizon calls "virtual care," itself a subset of telehealth. This can include video chats and even phone calls from health coaches and case managers, he explains.
Virtual care is a preferred option for sick employees and their children when they don't necessarily have to go to a doctor or emergency room, according to Sreedhar. "If we can make it compliant and secure, it's a breeze."
It also saves the company a ton of money and makes employees more productive by keeping them on the job rather than having to take off half a day to go to the doctor.
Alas, Verizon still is a technology company, not a healthcare provider. "We are not getting into clinical services per se," according to Sreedhar. "You will not see a Verizon m-health logo on a care management platform."
Expect the company to focus on its historical strengths, including its ability to scale and deploy technology rapidly and to help keep information secure, even on mobile devices.
"Mobility is great, but in healthcare, the most important things are identity, security and compliance," Sreedhar says.
