Alcatel-Lucent backs effort to highlight healthcare possibilities

Towering above the city of Pittsburgh, on the 60th floor of the U.S. Steel Tower, is a vision of healthcare's future that is built on integrated technology and connectivity.

The Center for Connected Medicine was founded by leaders in the healthcare, computing, networking and communications industries as a showcase to educate medical and business leaders about tech-based collaboration within the healthcare enterprise.

Though the center has only been open since September 2009, "already visitors have included our connected hospital customers from the United States and all over the world," said Jim White, vice president for Connected Hospital Sales at Alcatel-Lucent, one of CCM's founding partners. "People from 40 to 50 countries have come to visit the Center for Connected Medicine."

The center holds appeal for visitors from developed as well as developing nations. "Tele-health and telemedicine are pathways to the future of healthcare, both in the U.S. and globally. It is what patients want and need providers to offer if we hope to meet the daunting challenges of healthcare reform," said Dr. Andrew Watson, CCM's medical director.

In addition to Alcatel-Lucent, other CCM founding partners include Cerner, IBM, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Verizon. They have been joined by strategic partners BL Healthcare, dbMotion, Google, ikaSystems, Johnson Controls, Polycom, Research In Motion, Turner and Vital Images.

The center was conceived when UPMC was working with Alcatel-Lucent and other technology partners to build its newest hospital, the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, said White. CHP was the first U.S. pediatric hospital to achieve a Stage 7 Award from HIMSS Analytics, which means the facility achieved the highest level on the HIMSS electronic medical records adoption model and operates as a paperless hospital.

"The center is an executive briefing center that, through a combination of thought leadership discussions and real patient success stories, demonstrates the power of an integrated and connected care environment supported by HIT [healthcare information technology]. It strives to show visitors the power of business and healthcare coming together and help them better understand the future of their own institution's HIT strategy," said Angela Pantelas, CCM's executive director.

According to Pantelas, CCM "is looking at new care pathways and technology mechanisms to communicate with patient populations in providing the right care, to the right patient, at the right time. Technology is the fulcrum in this process, including: electronic health records, communication networks, new approaches to the practice of medicine (tele-health), and a continuous flow of virtualized patient information."

CCM demos and exhibits take a visitor through various treatment processes in order to show how a patient would receive ongoing care throughout an interconnected healthcare system, where medical information is shared among healthcare equipment, providers and institutions while protecting each patient's right to privacy.

Visitors to the center are generally invited by a CCM partner company. "Most of the people who come have something specific that they want to discuss," said Alcatel-Lucent's White. Topics might be clinical, administrative or technological. For instance, he said a medical institution may be considering the implementation of a certain technology, "and they want to understand how it could or would impact the way they practice medicine."

Hospitals stop being loners

To gather seed money for the CCM project, UPMC set up investment funds with each of its founding partners. In the case of Alcatel-Lucent, for example, "We have a joint-development solutions agreement with UPMC, where we each put $25 million into a fund so there's a $50 million fund for us to do things together," White said.

He noted the rapid changes coming to medicine are exemplified by the fact that Alcatel-Lucent's Connected Hospital team was created just this year, although the company has long been selling voice, data and video communications infrastructure to enable communications business processes within hospitals. Technologies supplied to connected hospitals by Alcatel-Lucent run the gamut across LANs, wireless networking, optical networking, PBXs and unified communications.

"Five years ago, the hospital was like a castle, and once you crossed the moat you were inside and everything happened inside the hospital. Slowly but surely what's been happening is that there's now a lot of people reaching into the hospital to provide information and people inside the hospital are reaching out to collaborate with other people. So it's become a global medical/healthcare industry," White said.

A hospital, he added, "is one of the few places that you see a genuine need to do real-time collaboration" to accomplish 24x7 mission-critical tasks.

Interoperability issue disappearing

With many vendors and medical institutions working to implement next-generation hospital connectivity, there have been some concerns regarding interoperability. However, vendor silos and proprietary technologies that long dominated medical institutions are starting to vanish.

"The healthcare industry is just now going through a level of standardization that most industries have already gone through," said Alcatel-Lucent's White. "The communications and IT industries bring a lot to the table when it comes to that standardization," he added.

Established technologies for secure communications can easily be leveraged to enable links between two end points that already exist in a healthcare environment, White noted. For instance, the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard might be used to allow a fetal monitor in a hospital to feed information into an electronic health record.

"In the world of telemedicine, hospital systems must build strong alliances with their vendor partners. They need to work together," CCM's Watson said. "The traditional ‘client/vendor' relationship is a relic of the past. Truly connected medicine requires integration, longitudinal follow-up, and collaboration. Innovation in its purest sense, between clients and vendors, involves the forging of long-term relationships which adapt, evolve and embrace technology."

Long-term relationships between hospitals and vendors "avoid the ‘one-off' and siloed purchases that have plagued healthcare to-date," he added.

"Networks deliver the vital information that keeps a hospital's doors open and patients alive by providing real-time access to patient data supporting evidence-based decision-making," Watson said, stressing the need for tools to "continuously monitor network key performance indicators--availability, utilization and capacity."

Added Watson, "A network is the lifeblood of healthcare and must be always on, failsafe, and able to handle the next generation of technology."

Remembering the human factor

 According to Alcatel-Lucent's White, it is crucial to acknowledge that workers within medical facilities hold the key to successful leveraging of the capabilities inherent in next-generation IT and communications networks. In addition to requiring ongoing technological advances, the emergence of connected hospitals will necessitate considerable staff training and systematic use of the new, collaborative tools.

"You have to train people, first of all to comply to use these systems and second of all to appreciate the value of using them systematically in their day-to-day transactions," said White.

And he predicts efforts to include all pertinent patient information in the connected hospital platform will eventually provide a big payoff in the form of insights that healthcare providers will gain in how to care for patients, "not just specifically but globally."