AT&T has announced that it will open a so-called innovation center at the Texas Medical Center in Houston to help entrepreneurs develop digital health platforms that can better connect patients wirelessly.
The Dallas-based giant already has four such innovation centers operating throughout the country, but Fortune magazine reports that this will be the first dedicated solely to healthcare. It will be called the Foundry for Connected Health and is aimed at providing infrastructure for startup companies to develop software that helps monitor patients wirelessly. It opens in February. Quoting the magazine:
AT&T isn’t an angel fund and doesn’t invest directly in startups. Instead, the Foundry model is intended to provide AT&T’s resources (like production facilities and business model planning) in order to get more successful connected products to market faster, which can provide new revenue for AT&T in different ways. For one, anytime a product is connecting into a network, the company can monetize that connectivity. The company is also looking for great end-to-end solutions, much like its remote patient monitoring system, that can be sold under the AT&T brand.
