The Nation's First Statewide eHealth Network

The state of Tennessee has picked AT&T for a major initiative -- the creation of the United States' first statewide health information exchange. The project is called The Tennessee Information Infrastructure eHealth Exchange Zone and will integrate the HIPAA compliant OnDemand Platform developed by Covisint, a company who bills themselves as "the world's largest and most secure on-demand collaboration platform."

The Dallas Business Journal brings us this statement from the Governor of Tennessee:

"Tennessee is proud to be the first to expand its current state network and offer a private, affordable, statewide secure network for exchanging critical health care information among providers," Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen says. "Our goal is to accurately and effectively deliver information to health care providers at the point of care, which will improve the quality of health care provided to the citizens of Tennessee. If a patient's medical history and record of care are available to the hospital, laboratory, pharmacy or physician, then they will ultimately receive better and more cost-effective medical care."

AT&T will construct a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that can support a wide variety of online health oriented tasks including sharing images (X-rays, MRIs, etc), telemedicine, remote diagnostics, e-prescriptions, and broad based access to electronic medical records. The combination of AT&T's VPN and Covisint's OnDemand Platform will allow the state's six regional health data organizations, as well as medical providers who are not part of those organizations, to access electronic medical data rapidly and securely.

According to the press release, as found on Fox Business, the secure broadband infrastructure provided by AT&T's VPN is available in all 95 counties of the state. It is the latest investment by the telco, which has put more than $3 billion into wireless and wired networks throughout Tennessee over the past decade.

Covisint's platform is used by more than 30,000 companies in the auto industry for secure data sharing. While the company's roots are in the car business, they are no strangers to health care. According to Information Week health care contributed 30% of the Covisint's $40 million of annual revenue and projections point to an increase to 50% over this year.

Are there any readers in Tennessee who would like to share their thoughts and opinions on this subject? We would love to hear from you!

SOURCE: "Covisint And AT&T Enter Health Care Exchange Market " 02/25/08
SOURCE: "AT&T to Deliver Country's First Statewide eHealth Exchange Zone" 02/25/08
SOURCE: "Tennessee, AT&T team up on development of statewide health-record network" 02/26/08
photo courtesy of euthman, used under this Creative Commons license