AT&T Expands Healthcare Community Online to Improve Patient Care

DALLAS, Feb. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Demonstrating its commitment to helping healthcare organizations improve operational efficiencies and enhance patient care, AT&T* today announced that it is expanding its AT&T Healthcare Community Online (HCO) solution to include a dynamic portal with pre-integrated applications.

AT&T HCO is a highly secure, cloud-based health information exchange (HIE) and collaboration portal. The solution integrates patient data from various sources into a single patient view, providing real-time access to patient information and eHealth applications over the world's most powerful and advanced IP/Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network. Real-time access to a patient's health records and relevant applications allows physicians and medical staff to provide faster and more accurate diagnosis at the point of care.  

AT&T HCO provides communities, hospitals and large healthcare systems the foundation necessary to support the meaningful use of health information technology (HIT). AT&T HCO makes information available for use in clinical decision support with tools that work to reduce medical errors and improve the quality of care. The solution helps healthcare providers, state and federal government agencies save time and costs through utilizing the existing HIT infrastructure and integrating it with new applications to enable community-wide exchange of electronic medical records (EMRs).  

The expanded features of AT&T HCO include:

• Dynamic portal that shares information electronically and in a secure way across the continuum of care — from patient to provider communities
• Real-time access to patient information at the point of care
• Physician's dashboard with clinical viewer and single sign-on access with patient context
• Pre-integrated third party applications  
  • ePrescribing
  • Medication History
  • Lab Services
  • EMRs
  • Medical Imaging
  • Telehealth
  • Claims Eligibility and Processing
  • Medical Content Providers
  • Pharma
  • Personal Health Records

AT&T HCO offers secure, single sign-on access to pre-integrated clinical, financial and administrative applications. With AT&T HCO, physicians and medical staff only need to sign-in once to access applications, including labs, reporting, ePrescribing, billing systems, patient registries, medical images, EMRs and other data. With the click of a mouse, users may access software applications in a highly secure environment.  

"AT&T is committed to serving technology needs across the continuum of healthcare – from patients to physicians to providers," said Xavier Williams, senior vice president, GEM (Government, Education and Medical) Markets. "AT&T HCO is just one example of how we understand and are addressing the unique needs of healthcare professionals working to protect and improve the health and well being of their patients and the community at large."

Slow technology adoption is the biggest challenge in healthcare today. According to preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2009 National Ambulatory Medical Survey, only 20.5 percent of physicians nationwide have EMR/Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems that meet the criteria of a basic system, and only 6.3 percent of physicians report that they are using a fully functional EMR system. AT&T HCO provides a foundation for implementing a modular or complete EHR solution and enables healthcare providers to choose the applications and features that best fit their needs. Providers can easily add, remove or change applications, allowing them to adopt HIT in an incremental and interchangeable approach that minimizes the impact on workflow. AT&T HCO integrates individual software components and practice management systems into a simple user-friendly interface – maximizing investments made by the hospital or physician's office and establishing a foundation for HIT growth and ease-of-use.  

In most healthcare communities, there is limited aggregation of patient information within and among healthcare organizations, many of which operate largely as islands with separate systems and processes. The healthcare industry is looking for better ways to cost-effectively and securely manage, store and share increasing amounts of patient data, as well as extend the boundaries beyond the hospital walls or physician's office. Today, healthcare providers, the federal government and state governments are all working together to focus on HIT, with HIE as a top priority. Several HIEs may exist within a state or even single healthcare system, and senior IT executives must work collaboratively to ensure customization and compatibility of disparate systems into larger health ecosystems.  

AT&T HCO utilizes Covisint's ExchangeLink for Healthcare platform that securely and efficiently stitches together the complex healthcare ecosystem by providing secure communication and collaboration between people and systems in simple ways. This comprehensive interoperability framework enables extended healthcare communities to effectively collaborate between physicians and practices, health systems and hospitals, health plans, labs and other third-party community members.

Security is one of the most important features of AT&T HCO. The solution incorporates federated authentication and identity management and provides an on-demand infrastructure for secure collaboration, interoperability and access to information. AT&T HCO is founded on three AT&T patents that enable a nationwide health information network and electronic healthcare data exchange among healthcare providers, physicians, patients and other members of the healthcare community.

For more information about AT&T healthcare solutions, please visit www.att.com/healthcare.

*AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand and not by AT&T Inc.

About AT&T

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) is a premier communications holding company. Its subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies – are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and around the world. With a powerful array of network resources that includes the nation's fastest 3G network, AT&T is a leading provider of wireless, Wi-Fi, high speed Internet and voice services. AT&T offers the best wireless coverage worldwide, offering the most wireless phones that work in the most countries. It also offers advanced TV services under the AT&T U-verse(SM) and AT&T | DIRECTV(SM) brands. The company's suite of IP-based business communications services is one of the most advanced in the world. In domestic markets, AT&T's Yellow Pages and YELLOWPAGES.COM organizations are known for their leadership in directory publishing and advertising sales. In 2009, AT&T again ranked No. 1 in the telecommunications industry on FORTUNE® magazine's list of the World's Most Admired Companies. Additional information about AT&T Inc. and the products and services provided by AT&T subsidiaries and affiliates is available at http://www.att.com.

© 2010 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies.

Additional information about AT&T Inc. and the products and services provided by AT&T subsidiaries and affiliates is available at http://www.att.com. This AT&T news release and other announcements are available at http://www.att.com/newsroom and as part of an RSS feed at www.att.com/rss. Or follow our news on Twitter at @ATTNews. Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ATT to discover more about our consumer and wireless services or at www.facebook.com/ATTSmallBiz to discover more about our small business services.

SOURCE AT&T Inc.