The Covisint subsidiary of Detroit's Compuware Corp. (NASDAQ: CPWR) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) are taking their health information sharing portal nationwide with an assist from Microsoft Corp.'s HealthVault.
Covisint and AT&T first announced a statewide health information sharing system for the state of Tennessee earlier this year.
Now, the two partners have added Microsoft HealthVault, a platform for storing and accessing personal health information, which will be used under the system to share information with authorized physicians and health care providers connected to AT&T's Healthcare Community Online.
Healthcare Community Online is a Virtual Private Network-based portal that enables electronic health care data exchange among existing systems of health care providers and physicians. It offers managed services, applications and authentication services and promotes the widespread adoption of health information technology by providing authorized doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, labs and patients with access to test results, prescription records, best practices and medical histories.
The new eHealth information exchange, enabled by Covisint's On-Demand Healthcare Platform and carried on AT&T's Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, shares information electronically and in a security-enhanced way from patient to provider communities such as HealthVault, health-information exchanges and insurers.
The new exchange platform brings together the key elements required to establish comprehensive interoperability and collaboration communities for national, state and local health-information exchanges, enabling such applications as:
* Prescribing pharmaceuticals online (also known as "ePrescribing").
* Providing clinical messaging among health care providers.
* Sharing high-density images, including X-rays, MRIs and CT scans.
* Exchanging patient-aggregated information via portable health records, which provides patient profiles, medical history, prescriptions, etc.
* Uploading of data from home health devices such as blood pressure meters, glucometers, etc., allowing for remote diagnostics and chronic disease monitoring and management.
* A streamlined clinical and administrative process.
This platform is highly scalable and may be rapidly deployed to large and small health-information exchanges as a hosted and managed service by subscribers to AT&T Healthcare Community Online. In addition, AT&T's connectivity offerings, combined with Covisint's platform, enable health care organizations to quickly establish high speed Internet and VPN connectivity to the extended health care community.
Brett Furst, vice president of healthcare at Covisint, said that under the system, patients will get to choose which health care information goes into their HealthVault page, from a variety of sources -- employers, health care providers, pharmacies and more.
Covisint, he said, will be in charge of the security and authentication of physician access to that patient information. "The idea with HealthVault is to give the patient control over what goes in, and who has access," Furst said.
Paul Toenjes, director of business development at Covisint, said the Compuware subsidiary has "established interfaces between the Covisint physician-facing environment and the HealthVault environment so there are handoffs that manage this interaction securely between the patient and physicians." Patients will also be able to share in-home measurements like blood pressure and weight in their HealthVault account. All of the HealthVault information will be displayed as a dashboard of clinical and patient-managed information that authorized healthcare providers will be able to see.
Furst said the system will be "very low cost" to physicians, with the revenue coming "from other endpoints that want to get access to the physicians or patients" -- vendors, payers, states, large health care systems.
The system will be agnostic as to the electronic medical records or e-prescibing systems used by individual physicians, clinics or other providers.
After broad-based communities are connected, authorized community members will immediately be able to access clinical applications, share health information and collaborate on specific medical cases. AT&T's managed telemedicine services enable patients in rural or underserved areas to consult with medical specialists and even receive examinations in the comfort of their primary physician's office, community hospital or clinic.
HealthVault is designed to put people in control of their health data. It helps them collect, store and share health information with authorized family members and participating health care providers, and it provides people with a choice of third-party applications and devices to help them manage things such as fitness, diet and health. HealthVault also provides a privacy- and security-enhanced foundation on which a broad ecosystem of providers -- from medical providers and health and wellness device manufacturers to health associations -- can build innovative new health and wellness solutions to help put people in control of their and their family's health.
The Covisint system brings together all health care data available from a wide variety of disparate systems under the context of a specific patient and aggregates this information into a single portal dashboard, which is then made available to the patient's physician. This capability -- along with the ability to perform cross-domain single sign-on -- enables all applications and data from the extended health care community to be brought together and behave as one cohesive application.
The new eHealth information exchange, which was showcased earlier this month at the Microsoft HealthVault Solutions Conference in Bellevue, Wash., extends the capabilities announced in February by AT&T regarding Tennessee's statewide eHealth information exchange, which is also secured by Covisint's platform.
For more information about AT&T products and services for the health care industry, please visit http://www.att.com/healthcare or www.covisint.com.
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