AT&T this week announced a management service that allows physicians to access medical images from the cloud via their mobile devices. Additionally, it announced a partnership with Annapolis, Md.-based Zephyr Technology to provide wireless access to its biometric devices.

The new cloud service allows doctors and hospitals to store millions of X-rays, MRIs and other digital images and access them from nearly anywhere. AT&T announced that Baptist Health System and Henry Ford Health System have signed agreements to pilot the service that will  connect docs to patients' medical images, regardless of which device originally took the image, allowing them to offer faster treatment.

[See also: AT&T launches 'ForHealth' division and a suite of new products.]

AT&T execs say the service will help lower costs in an industry where today it can take multiple and unconnected systems and devices to transmit a single image.

"With the AT&T solution – which uses the power of our network combined with digital imaging technology – doctors and other healthcare providers can transform the way they treat patients," said Randall Porter, assistant vice president, AT&T ForHealth.

Baptist Health System, one of the largest healthcare systems in Alabama and one of the state's largest employers, has first-hand experience with increasing storage and management requirements, given its scale, vendor complexity and forecasted growth. Baptist Health System has accumulated more than 2 million images and creates about 30,000 new images per month, or 350,000 annually, that it would like to share throughout its physician community.  

"We believe AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management can help us provide improved management and access to our ongoing medical imaging studies and long-term medical imaging, as we expand access to patient medical images to our physician community," said Richard Shirey, chief information officer of Baptist Health System.  

Henry Ford Health System, one of the nation's leading comprehensive, integrated health systems based in Michigan, plans to use AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management to store new cardiology medical imaging studies and to move other cardiology studies from its existing solution to the AT&T solution. Henry Ford Health System expects to gain efficiencies from consolidated expandable storage, providing cloud-based access to cardiologists in various heart centers.

"The model that AT&T offers will help us manage images while containing costs for our $4 billion integrated health system," said Kevin Yee, administrator for the Edith and Benson Ford Heart & Vascular Institute, Henry Ford Hospital.

AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management is a vendor-neutral, cloud-based service that combines AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service with Acuo Technologies' Universal Clinical Platform. The service provides access, viewing, storage and sharing of medical images from disparate picture archive communications systems (PACS) sold on an as needed, pay-as-you-go model.

[See also: AT&T teams with eCardio Diagnostics for mobile cardiac care.]

Also this week, AT&T and Zephyr Technology announced an agreement for AT&T to provide integrated wireless access to the next generation of the Zephyr BioHarness, which measures critical vital signs such as ECG, heart rate, breathing rate and skin temperature, and then contextualizes the information with the individual's physical activity using an accelerometer. The data is then viewed through the Zephyr portal or pushed to electronic health records and applications.

"With the BioHarness, connected by AT&T, cardiologists will be equipped to remotely monitor ECGs, athletes will have the ability to share live performance data, and medics will have on-demand visibility into the condition of military personnel – all occurring seamlessly over the AT&T network," said Glenn Lurie, president of emerging devices, resale and partnerships, AT&T. "Today, smartphones capture Zephyr's BioData and send it to the cloud for analysis, presentation and health record purposes.  By Embedding wireless into the BioHarness, we're arming healthcare professionals with the technology needed to access timely data in ways not previously possible."    

"Zephyr has created a comprehensive approach that delivers useful physiological data in an understandable way," added Brian Russell, Zephyr's CEO.  "Our unique approach makes it easy for an individual to keep an eye on their health and to share that information with health providers, friends and family."

Zephyr will integrate direct cellular technology into the BioHarness to simplify implementation and more rapidly penetrate the mHealth market, officials say.

"AT&T has the right infrastructure and the necessary flexibility to meet the evolving requirements of connected health," said Russell.