Networking to Play Growing Role in Medical Vertical

The health care industry is in the midst of change. Slowly but steadily, it is transitioning from centuries of paper-reliant systems to electronic methods of record-keeping and sharing. All this can result in faster claims processing, a decreased chance of lost data and the ability for individuals to play a bigger role in their own health care. Of course, putting extremely delicate information related to health online, and connecting doctors and patients via networks so they can communicate and access such information requires impermeable networks, stringent security and privacy protections. And that is creating unprecedented opportunity for communications service providers.

The health care industry will spend $55 billion on telecommunications services over the next five years, according to a recent study by Insight Research Corp., which reports that an expected 16 percent increase of health care facilities in that same period will help drive that spending.

Data backup is to be another important consideration for the health care industry moving forward. Hurricane Katrina proved that natural disasters can wipe out a lifetime of data. So can terrorism. And the health care vertical lags other industries — like the financial sector — in business continuity and disaster recovery.

Meanwhile, there’s a movement among insurance companies and medical organizations to promote better member health by getting patients more involved through online access to their information (known in the industry as personal health records, or PHRs) and other resources. There are a wide variety of efforts on this front. For example, Microsoft Corp. has developed HealthVault, Google created Google Health and online health pioneer WebMD has Health Manager. Kaiser Permanente this year chose Microsoft to help it pilot the exchange of employees’ health care records. “This is a venture into portability,” said Jan Oldenburg, practice leader in Kaiser Permanente’s health portfolio Internet services group. In other words, the records will be permanent but if a member loses Kaiser Permanente coverage, or switches, he or she retains his or her records.

The voluntary test program starts this fall. About 600 of the company’s 159,000 staff had signed up by xchange’s press time. Participants will set access permissions and then they and their physicians will see the same information, such as immunizations, lab results, allergies and prescriptions. Participants also can communicate with their doctors via e-mail and grant access to their records to family members.

“We’re not thinking about this as a cost-savings measure, but as something that really is a service to the members and their desire for flexibility,” said Oldenburg.

Users want flexibility, to be sure, but they also want to know that someone who’s not authorized can’t get at their data. Microsoft knew it would face that kind of scrutiny, and planned for it. It decided to use a certain emerging protocol and implemented an approach to privacy arguably more stringent than any mandated by Congress. Since federal privacy laws such as HIPAA don’t apply to software makers, Microsoft needed to go above and beyond existing government standards to ensure HealthVault stays airtight.

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