Healthcare to benefit from mobile technology with Orange and Alcatel-Lucent

Orange and Alcatel-Lucent have agreed to tackle healthcare issues in Europe together. The two companies have signed a cooperation agreement, which will see them combine technology and infrastructure for electronic-assisted healthcare, or e-health.

No products have been announced yet, but the companies have announced that they’re focusing on three areas: assisted living for patients and the elderly, better business efficiency for healthcare professionals, and cutting costs for healthcare.

Both companies already have experience in healthcare. Orange has it’s “Connected Hospitals” solution, while Alcatel-Lucent provides home-care help through telecare.

From the release:

Thierry Zylberberg, Executive Vice President, Head of Orange Healthcare Division says that “telecommunications today means much more than voice services. Orange is constantly seeking to innovate in order to deliver greater value and to offer its customers services and solutions, such as e-health, to improve their life. Our agreement with Alcatel-Lucent in this field is a long lasting one, highlighting our willingness to reinforce our cooperative efforts to deliver the best e-health solutions for our customers.”

Pierre Barnabé, head of Alcatel-Lucent’s business in France, said “the health domain requires innovative, reliable, and secured communications solutions. Communications have to play a key role in the transformation of health systems and the marketplace is looking for trusted partners that understand a broad range of communications technologies and can simplify them in a turnkey solution. We believe this partnership with Orange illustrates perfectly our philosophy in terms of shared innovation and addresses the challenging healthcare domain requirements in a very innovative manner and in a way that will improve the life of the patients.”

What we think?

Healthcare is one of those areas which could benefit hugely from mobile technologies, much like transport. It’s one of those industries with a highly mobile workforce and clientelle. Medical professionals are often on the go all the time, and patients can be anywhere. Mobile solutions that assist mobile workforces could be of great use. There are already some applications available, eg. Airstrip for iPhone. But that’s a one device solution. A committed push from Alcatel-Lucent and Orange could see standardised servers placed in every hospital - which would allow enterprise apps to be run on-server and ported out to any device. The bring-your-own-phone model could really work in a hospital, where the Doctors who need those kind of applications are pretty likely to own a smartphone anyway!