Improving Health Care

Health care delivery needs a new business model — one that puts consumers in the center and uses the power of the market to improve quality and lower costs.

Physicians at Ventura County Medical Center in California are using digital-imaging equipment and a mobile mammography van funded in part by the Verizon Foundation to extend their reach to women in underserved areas.

While the American health care system is without peer in many important ways, delivering it to people is becoming increasingly expensive, inefficient and, as a result, beyond the reach of millions. We think our technology can help.

Solutions for Improved Health Care

Many of the critical steps for improved care depend on fostering collaboration and getting the right information into the right hands — when and where it’s needed. We’re adapting our broadband and mobile technologies to help provide new answers to some longstanding challenges in health care and accessibility.

• To accelerate the sharing of electronic data in the health care field, Verizon began issuing free medical identity credentials in January 2011 to 2.3 million physicians and health care professionals in the U.S., enabling them to access and share patient information — e.g., records, x-rays, lab results — via electronic health exchanges.

• Verizon and BL Health care have demonstrated a telemedicine system that uses our 4G wireless network to create a new, more individualized level of remote health care. The new platform connects with blood pressure monitors, scales, pulse readers, glucose meters, EKGs and other medical devices, allowing doctors to remotely view the data while holding an HD videoconference with the patient.

• A large hurdle to creating an effective national electronic health records system is the inability of health care providers to share the wide range and volume of clinical notes that are produced annually. Verizon’s free Medical Data Exchange solves that problem by providing a platform that enables medical transcription firms to share digitized clinical documents between doctors, hospitals and other health care providers nationwide.