AT&T (NYSE:T) introduced the beta version of its Developer Center ForHealth, an open, cloud-based environment designed to nurture the creation of enterprise-grade mobile healthcare applications.
According to AT&T, most of the 17,000 mHealth applications currently available in app stores are hamstrung in their ability to access and share information because data is siloed across a series of unconnected proprietary systems--in addition, healthcare companies are limited by what information they can collect, and consumers are only granted access to data they store independently. The AT&T Developer Center ForHealth promises to remedy the problem by storing aggregated health, wellness and clinical data in an environment that protects patient privacy and meets HIPAA Security Rule requirements while still granting applications access to IT data systems across hospitals, physician practices, health insurers and other institutions.
The AT&T Developer Center ForHealth portal includes tools to help developers build connected and integrated solutions that can share data with other apps, freeing consumers from the chore of manually keying information into each app. AT&T also promises an API gateway and mobile client optimized for embedding within any third-party app, support app-to-app communication as well as interaction with health and wellness peripherals and devices. Enterprise billing and end-to-end customer support round out the portal.
The AT&T Developer Center ForHealth supports all major mobile operating systems, including Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS, Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android, Research In Motion's (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry and Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone. Developers can sign up here to access the beta version of the portal--AT&T also will mount codeathons, hackathons and developer boot camps with mHealth developer communities and accelerators including HIMSS, Rock Health, StartUp Health and Health 2.0.
For more:
- read this release
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