Verizon Announces Their Entry into the HIE Market – VHIE Personal Health Records In the Cloud

Update-Correction

It was a bit confusing to myself to make sure I covered this correctly; however, Verizon was kind enough to inform me of the fact that the current focus is going to be with connection physicians and hospitals, with the PHR capabilities coming on line later, but you can see the groundwork is being laid to facilitate the entire connection in time so the consumer side will evolve in time.

The original post is below:

We have one more entry into the already over crowded PHR business that consumers are slowly beginning to embrace. MedFX technology stands to perhaps make some money here, the technology used for the personal health records. We already have Google Health, HealthVault and several others offered by insurance companies and 3rd party medical billing/analysis companies. Just like the EHR race, this one is going strong too with PHRs.

The service is not free though and doctors offices will have to “pay per use” so compared to the “free” programs out there, this might be a little slow taking off as the value with PHRs right now for consumers has really not been evaluated by most and heck so many don’t even know what a PHR is. BD

Verizon Business today announced its entry into the health information exchange business, launching a cloud-based service that makes personal medical records available to authorized medical personnel.

The Verizon Health Information Exchange (VHIE) will provide a unified view of a patient's medical record that can be accessed via an Internet connection from a doctor's office or hospital.

Built using Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL)'s Enterprise Master Patient Index, which enables all the medical records of a given patient to be associated to a unique key, the VHIE will have built-in identity management to protect individual records, and Verizon security to prevent denial-of-service attacks and other threats.

The VHIE is Verizon's latest foray into vertical applications for the healthcare industry, which began with the creation of a devoted business unit, Verizon Connected Health Care Solutions, and which includes the hiring of people from the health sector, such as Grundler.

Patients will be able to control who has access to their records and decide which records are available, Grundler says.

The viewer and presentation layer of the VHIE are based on technology from MedFX.

"Jane Doe can allow access to her health records, but prevent access to her mental health records or her HIV status, for example," he says.