AT&T strategy chief lays out plans to improve healthcare IT

AT&T’s chief strategy officer announced the company’s plans to improve healthcare technology by opening its sixth innovation center in Houston’s medical district, reports Healthcare Daily.

“The network of the future doesn’t get here all at once,” John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president of AT&T Technology and Operations, said at the Telecommunications Industry Association Network of the Future Conference on June 7. “But we are super excited about where the future is in networking. The age of guessing is over.”

The Foundry for Connected Health has a goal to increase patient’s ability to share their health information with their providers without the fear of hackers. In a collaboration between hospitals, clinics and startups the Foundry hopes to develop innovations to improve healthcare by focusing on home, clinical, and nursing station settings that will be tested out in the world’s largest medical center.

Donovan states that this is not the first time the company has dabbled in the healthcare field, its new software centric solution, Network on Demand, is already aiding health professionals in Austin.

At Austin Cancer Center, which has adopted the technology, patients are able to receive their results and treatments faster while their providers use the software to send images to radiologists at any of its 12 locations as soon as scans are completed. The center now has the ability to scale up and down its bandwidth according to its needs.