AT&T Boots Up Connected Health Facility

AT&T is leveraging its Internet of Things ecosystem for the new AT&T Foundry innovation center for Connected Health, which opened its doors on Tuesday.

The telco's newest Foundry, which is its sixth, is focused on providing digital health services from inside Texas Medical Center's (TMC) Innovation Institute in Houston, Texas.

"We've been listening to the health care industry, many of whom are already customers, about the challenges they face today," said Chris Penrose, senior vice president, Internet of Things, AT&T, in a prepared statement. "We want to help create stronger connections between caregivers and patients. By applying the Foundry model and IoT insights into health care, we can help providers accomplish their goals."

By combining its traditional value chain with its Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) can help healthcare stakeholders communicate in near real-time to transform digital healthcare with more timely results and care in a highly secure manner, Penrose said.

"Providing patients and caregivers with this information in near real-time makes it more actionable, catching shifts in health and informing faster medical decisions," Penrose said via email. "And connectivity represents an opportunity for healthcare institutions to lower costs for both patients and caregivers while helping to improve health outcomes."

The digital healthcare market in the US is worth about $15 billion per year, but to date large service providers in the US have failed to capitalize on the opportunities, according to a recent story by Bloomberg. (See Seen & Heard: Telemedicine Efforts Need a Health Check.)

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation