Earlier this week, TELUS opened the doors of its Toronto offices to show off a newly-renovated Innovation Centre, featuring a number of healthcare-related products and services, among other things.
Although the entire [health] sector is highly regulated, one of the leading Canadian operators thinks there’s real money to be made here. “We don’t buy and sell sports teams; healthcare is TELUS’s content play,” said Paul Lepage, President of TELUS Health, who before joining the company in 2009 was the CEO of MediSolution Ltd, a major North American IT firm.
the idea is to get doctors and pharmacists using centralized electronic medical records that can be easily indexed, transferred and updated.According to him, the idea is to get doctors and pharmacists using centralized electronic medical records that can be easily indexed, transferred and updated. “Our goal is to minimize inefficiencies between patient, pharmacist and physician collaboration. How do we drive the use of that patient data to improve healthcare?”
Because much of the healthcare burden in the future is going to centre on an aging population, TELUS means to make it easier for physicians and nurses to offer remote patient care. Home Health Monitoring is an endeavor to transfer data — such as heart rate, blood pressure and glucose levels — to and from a physician’s office over a wireless connection.
As part of the same goal, the carrier has been pushing different wearable devices, especially at the consumer level. While the health benefits of counting steps has yet to deliver on its promises, we’re still at the early stages of a movement for which, TELUS believes, the cumulative upsides will be enormous.
At the moment, TELUS health-related revenues are around $500 million, but going forward they prepare for a massive growth and are setting themselves up for the task. Dealing with various local regulators isn’t fun, but they believe it’s all part of a bigger picture to deliver better, digitized healthcare services, while making some serious buck along the way. We’ll see how that goes.
[Via: MobileSyrup]