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US-based ICT solutions provider Verizon Business has launched an ambitious new service that it hopes will become the backbone of a new wave of health information exchanges (HIEs).

The Verizon Health Information Exchange can be used by doctors and healthcare providers to store, manage and transfer patient information, including medical records, test results, medical images and more, all hosted on Verizon's infrastructure.

The project is nothing if not ambitious. Verizon says it is ready to roll nationwide and can absorb as many electronic medical records (EMR) as are currently out there; there may eventually be one for every person in the United States. It may even offer personal health records (PHR) to its telco customers. Early adopters of Verizon's HIE say it is a good way to address the most severe handicap of the medical industry.

"Healthcare has had the most advanced technologies available, but it's all in diagnosis and treatment," said MedVirginia CEO Michael Matthews, who added that communications and data management technologies remain primitive in the healthcare industry. "To get the data to the physician, you might as well be using [the] Pony Express," he said.

Matthews said that while attitudes are starting to change, IT staples of the business world, like process and intelligence tools and data management, are severely underfunded in hospitals. He said two percent of a providers' technology budget typically goes toward improving data usage, whereas in the banking industry it was more than 10% and viewed as a high priority.

MedVirginia is a healthcare provider-owned health information exchange. It currently hosts more than one million patient records in the state of Virginia and provides a gateway to the National Health Information Network, a federally-funded project attempting to connect healthcare networks across the country.

Matthews said it had been operational for five years but is currently switching off its own homegrown systems in favor of Verizon's service by the first quarter of 2011. Matthews added that MedVirginia would still operate its gateway to the NHIN, but its entire base of patient records will be stored with Verizon and delivered via the cloud.

Matthews said the chief benefit to using the Verizon HIE is its practically limitless scale, something he could never hope to match, as well as access to Verizon's managed security and identity services, something he also said Verizon was far better positioned to deliver than he was.

"There were two driving factors for us," he said. "One was scalability -- MedVirginia has grown pretty dramatically over the last few years. The other was security."