As health care IT starts to heat up due in large part to the Obama administration's promised injection of billions of dollars of stimulus, Covisint announced this week a major deal with the American Medical Association (AMA).
The deal will make the Covisint AppCloud platform the infrastructure behind dozens of AMA administrative, clinical, and teaching services offered in the cloud. The Covisint technology will also be used to stitch together disparate best-of-breed solutions from health care vendors using a federated architecture that allows physicians' data to be shared by the various applications.
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Although security and stringent privacy regulations have been a major challenge for medical practices, Brett Furst, vice president of health care at Covisint, said Covisint built its platform to address this thorny issue. It will offer single sign-on, verifying and moving physicians' credentials as they request information, services, and applications from various organizations and government agencies, such as the Center for Disease Control.
"Cloud computing can cause a lot of complexity when a user is logging into a thousand points of light," said Furst.
In addition to solutions offered by third-party SaaS providers hosted by the AMA on its site, the organization, which includes about one-third of all physicians in the United States, will offer online training and administrative functions as well as decision support tools for diagnosis and referral tools for finding experts and discussing cases.
In the near future, Covisint will also make available secure chat rooms and collaboration centers, said Furst.
The AMA's Covisint solution will connect doctors across their various organizations, state-based and national.
Covisint is a subsidiary of Compuware.