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Two Years Later: Alcatel-Lucent and UPMC

Many will remember the splash that Alcatel-Lucent and the University of Pittsburg Medical Center (UPMC) made when they announced a $300 million, 10-year deal. There is typically a fair amount of skepticism about such grand pronouncements of huge enterprise contacts, around whether the amount of money changing hands will ever really approach the promised levels. One of the presentations at last week's Alcatel-Lucent Global Industry Analyst Conference, by Bill Fera, MD and Director of Medical IT Software and Solutions, provided a solid update of the progress of the agreement to date.
Sheila McGee-Smith
September 22, 2008

Based on current spending levels, Fera estimates that the total value of the deal will actually exceed the $300 million level and be closer to $380 million. With UPMC's annual IT spending of approximately $200 million, that means that ALU has a pretty impressive 20 percent share of wallet, and that ALU revenue will be 25 percent higher than originally forecast.

Not surprising then to hear UPMC report that there are 60 Alcatel-Lucent people in Pittsburg supporting the account full time. Even ALU Enterprise's SVP of Worldwide Sales and Channels says he visits Pittsburg about once every six weeks.

Even with these solid stats as proof points to the ongoing success of the ALU/UPMC partnership, the more interesting part of Fera's presentation talked about the new health care services the two companies have already created, or begun to map out, that combine communications technology with health care processes.

* TeleDerm: For a hospital location with no dermatologists on site, video conferencing to allow a remotely-based specialist - along with other types of objective data - to diagnose and treat a patient.

* TeleStroke: If a stroke victim can get a drug called TPA within 3 hours of an episode, the possibility exists to break up the clot, resulting in little if any brain damage. The problem is if the drug is given to the wrong patient, one who hasn't had a stroke but has some other malady, a hemorrhage can be caused. The ability to remotely "bring" the neurologist to the patient via video conferencing, along with the results of the locally-performed CAT scan, has allowed UPMC to go from 2% delivery of the drug to 10%.

In addition, UPMC discussed the somewhat self-explanatory eVisits, for follow-up care visits; TeleRadiology for remote diagnostic testing; and Virtual Grand Rounds.

As Dr. Fera spoke, I was alternately impressed, scared (by stats of what happens when these technologies are not available), but mostly convinced - that as an industry we're onto something with communications-enabling business (or health care) processes.

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