NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Leveraging technology to enhance the health care experience for patients and practitioners alike, AT&T (NYSE: T) today announced a major initiative with the State of Tennessee to deliver the country's first statewide health information exchange.

The Tennessee Information Infrastructure eHealth Exchange Zone is being developed to transform how health information is accessed and delivered by the Tennessee care-giving community and, ultimately, to enable increased patient safety, reduced spending and improved quality of care for the state's 6 million residents.

AT&T is actively engaged with the state and health care providers statewide in building the eHealth Exchange Zone. Plans call for eHealth applications to be phased in as participation by health care providers grows.

The AT&T solution features a secure online collaboration center -- a Virtual Private Network (VPN)-based portal -- designed to safely and securely enable such applications as:

The network has an added component especially for protecting health information provided by the Covisint OnDemand Platform. The platform is a hosted solution that provides dual-factor authentication of health care providers using the VPN-based portal, which supports HIPAA privacy requirements. It also centralizes, automates and streamlines the access to information across health care communities statewide by giving physicians the ability to use many health-information applications with a single sign-on. The platform from Covisint, a division of Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq: CPWR), provides an on-demand, industry-leading infrastructure for secure collaboration and interoperability among health care providers.

The Tennessee eHealth network also features two patented solutions from AT&T, including establishing a:

"Tennessee is proud to be the first to expand its current state network and offer a private, affordable, statewide secure network for exchanging critical health care information among providers," said Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen. "Our goal is to accurately and effectively deliver information to health care providers at the point of care, which will improve the quality of health care provided to the citizens of Tennessee. If a patient's medical history and record of care are available to the hospital, laboratory, pharmacy or physician, then they will ultimately receive better and more cost-effective medical care."

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T)