It’s no surprise that many different industries are waking up to the huge marketing potential in healthcare these days.
Jennifer Dennard noted in a recent story that AT&T has now formed AT&T ForHealth, which, just this summer, announced its new focus on using mobile technologies to improve clinical care, but whose major goal is to help advance ‘personalized medicine,’ which finds specific treatments for each person’s illness, rather than using a generalized protocol.
Recently, the company entered into collaboration with National LambdaRail (NLR) – an advanced research communications network that helps connect researchers in the area of genomic medicine, Dennard reported.
In July AT&T and NLR jointly announced “the first step toward a networking solution to virtually connect major cancer centers, universities, medical schools, research hospitals, laboratories and other institutions across the United States to help transform the healthcare industry's ability to diagnose, prevent, treat and/or manage illness and medical conditions of all kinds,” according to a statement.
AT&T will provide high bandwidth connectivity to NLR’s national network infrastructure for health sciences institutions to connect just about all of the nation's key academic, healthcare and research institutions to speed up the movement of new science into therapy and better healthcare, Geeta Nayyar, M.D., Chief Medical Information Officer at AT&T ForHealth told Dennard in an interview.
Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica will be the first to benefit from the higher bandwidth, according to the press release.
“Personalized medicine represents an evolution in clinical care that offers new ways of diagnosing, predicting outcomes, and effectively treating illness while minimizing side effects,” as Nayyar told Dennard. “The concept is that providers are able to specifically customize care for an individual patient, based on their specific genetic profile.”
Other companies are working on this, too. In March IBM and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced plans to partner with IBM’s Watson to develop a powerful tool to help improve the ability of healthcare providers to “personalize” treatments to cancer patients’ specific needs.
“Currently, there is no way for a doctor to really know with certainty if an individual patient will respond to medications or treatments that are prescribed,” as Nayyar told Dennard. “Genomic medicine allows the possibility of tailoring care to an individual’s genetic makeup and even predicting how their disease may progress or respond to specific interventions.”
A study in July found that, by comparing drugs and genetic targets, researchers can more easily identify pharmaceuticals that could be effective against different forms of cancer, making it possible some day to find treatments personally tailored to every individual suffering from this disease and others.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
