Verizon is transforming itself from a telecommunications company to an information technology vendor with health care its lead market, says Peter Tippett, M.D., vice president and chief medical officer of Verizon Connected Healthcare Solutions.
Health Evolution Partners, chaired by David Brailer, M.D., a former health information technology vendor executive who served as the first national coordinator for health information technology, invests in health care companies and is pushing 100 firms in its portfolio. Health Evolution Partners will work with Verizon to bring some of these companies new applications and platforms they could never have on their own, Brailer says. Mollen Immunization Clinics, for instance, operates seasonal flu shot clinics across the nation with mobile nurses in schools, nursing homes, stores, corporations, government agencies and community centers. Now, Verizon is working with Mollen to build a hosted custom electronic health records system with clinical decision support and importation of data into other EHRs and registries.
Health Evolution Partners’ portfolio companies also will help Verizon test new technologies and services, or demonstrate existing capabilities. For instance, Verizon wants to bring existing technologies it has acquired in recent years deeper into the health care industry. These include Cybertrust, which manages identities across multiple information systems, and Terremark, which operates cloud-based secure data centers.
“We find each other’s value so high that we’ve agreed to dig in and spend a lot of time and money to make each others’ business accelerate,” Tippett says.
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