Responsibility Blog

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I've written here that Verizon is uniquely positioned to help create broad social value in our communities, and how our networks can serve as an engine for technological innovation and economic growth. Our CEO, Lowell McAdam, spoke yesterday at the World Health Care Congress on how we are applying these principles to help improve the health care system.

McAdam laid out the challenges to improving the U.S. health care system: Three years after the federal government began a big push to get the industry to adopt electronic medical records, the full transformational potential of health IT remains untapped.

Although a great deal of progress has been made, doctors report that incompatible systems and frustrating interfaces cause their productivity rates go down, not up, when technology is introduced. Two-thirds of people in rural areas still have to travel more than an hour to get quality medical care, and in our age of anywhere-anytime access to information, patients still don't have the seamless connection to their health care systems as they do to other forms of digital content.

The result, according to our CEO, is that consumers and providers are still frustrated, access to quality health care is still uneven, and health care costs are still rising at an unsustainable rate. Unsolved issues of security, interoperability and standardization combine to gum up the works. A health care system that should enable smooth interaction between doctor and patient and free-flowing information exchange between computerized medical systems is still too rough and too cumbersome.

Here's how Lowell says we'll reduce the friction:

• Use what we do best: Our networks reach from large databases of medical records all the way to the phone in the customer's pocket. These networks can provide the seamless, secure connections that can make instant information exchange a useful reality. To this end we've created several Innovation Centers to help entrepreneurs integrate our high-speed wireless data networks into their products. Earlier this year we showed some promising health care products at CES and are testing a mobile teleconferencing service with Wellpoint.

• Make our Foundation a laboratory for innovation: Our foundation is focused on finding new ways to use technology to address the needs of the underserved and raise the standard of care for everyone. For example, we helped fund a telemedicine nursing program in telemedicine in rural Wise County, Virginia.

• Bring everyone to the table: Issues such as security and interoperability are complex and require consensus from many groups, from doctors in small practices to large insurance companies to government regulators. We have a long history of bringing disparate parties together to work towards common standards and the common good. For example, we've seen that there is no universal system for authenticating users in a connected environment. So  we have issued free identity services to the industry that give doctors hassle-free, secure access to patient information. We're also working to make networked information more easily available through the use of Health Information Exchanges and reduce regulatory impediments to these technological innovations.

• Forge partnerships with experts: our experience as an integrator of solutions has given us great partnerships. We're collaborating with universities, medical institutions, insurers and investors to test new solutions, and we're convinced that we can find new market opportunities. This will bear fruit later this year when we introduce a new suite of cloud-based health care services that will address — at first — chronic disease management. More applications will follow.

It bears repeating that the creation of value for society isn't at odds with creating value for our business. The key, according to Lowell, is putting the health care consumer in the center of this new generation of technology. If we give customers reliability, privacy, anytime-anywhere access, and above all, control, then our success will be shared with the larger community, and the same technology that promises to transform the health care industry can become both a growth opportunity for our business and improve the quality of life for us all.

Note: The full speech video and a speech transcript are available online.