Giving credit where it is due, Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Alex Nussbaum broke what is emerging as a very exciting piece of news, with the revelation that on March 5, Verizon is launching what is billed as “the first national service enabling doctors to securely exchange medical records no matter what computer system they use.”
Under the moniker, Secure Universal Message Services (SUMS), it is in short, docs for docs.
SUMS is the result of testing by about a dozen U.S. hospital systems and other clients. The best way to think of this is as a secure version of hosted e-mail, which is, in essence, Dropbox-like for the exchange of confidential information contained in large files that meets the stringent standards of HIPPA compliance.
Protecting medical record privacy
Despite the push for years, by the various stakeholders in the medical industry, and the Obama Administration’s latest initiatives to “bend the curve” of healthcare costs associated with time-consuming and mostly manual transfer of private medical records, doctors have been reluctant to digitize the information and exchange it. Not only is this costly, but it also affects the quality of healthcare delivery when the right people do not have the best information at the right time.
As the article also points out, the problem has been all but intractable, as hospitals and software providers typically create closed systems that don’t communicate with one another.
SUMS will cost about $10 to $60 a month per user for doctor’s offices and hospitals to be on the system, which will have two components: an information exchange for hospitals to securely move data, and a Web-based portal though which providers, from doctors to nurses to ambulance drivers, can exchange messages and texts.
Dr. Peter Tippett, the New York-based company’s chief medical officer, noted that, “The vast majority of stuff shared by providers ends up not digitizable, and it’s a huge pain…There’s huge savings in this. There’s a huge easing of access and care.”
Tippet also stated that Verizon believes its new service will be a “game- changing” solution, Tippet said. “We really think it will be disruptive,” he said. “It’s kind of like giving a gift of e-mail, but in a secure form, to the entire health-care ecosystem.”
Physicians have traditionally avoided e-mail because of security concerns and data limits that often prevent them from sending large files such as X-Rays and MRIs, Tippett said. SUMS overcomes those problems and is likely to attract “thousands” of medical providers.
Tippet also believes SUMS will be a “game-changing” solution.
“We really think it will be disruptive,” he said. “It’s kind of like giving a gift of e-mail, but in a secure form, to the entire health-care ecosystem.”
Just as background, the Obama Administration’s records initiative, enacted as part of the economic stimulus law in 2009, makes hospitals eligible for payments of as much as $11.5 million if they can demonstrate “meaningful use” of a computer system.
Hospitals and doctors who don’t adopt electronic records by 2015 will be penalized with lower Medicare payments.
SUMS joins the Direct Project as a HIPPA-compliant means for medical practitioners to exchange clinical information, without the need for any additional health information exchange (HIE) capabilities. This is a hot topic, as one might expect at the current annual HIMSS13 gathering of health information officers.
In fact, in related news, secure messaging provider TigerText has announced the launch of what it calling, “the first ever open API that is HIPPA-compliant. According to the company, “TigerConnect is the only open API solution that lets any organization use the power of secure messaging to reach any colleague, customer or partner in real time.”
The pre-launch solution is already processing one million secure text messages per day. In addition, TigerText has an API integration with Dropbox, and will next week announce one with Box.
One thing is clear: secure communications is a vital organ for improving the quality of healthcare, and one can expect a lot more activity on this front as healthcare information exchanges proliferate, and the entire medical community looks to improve care and cut costs by automating cumbersome and costly information exchanges.
Docs for docs, as Dr. Tippet explained, can indeed be a game-changer. Things like SUMS can be greater than the whole.
Edited by
Braden Becker
