E-health consortium hopes second time is the charm for patient data repository plan

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March 11, 2008 (Computerworld) ORLANDO — The Dossia electronic health records consortium was dealt a blow last summer, when a highly publicized development deal that it announced in late 2006 with a nonprofit research organization ended in a legal dispute.

But according to Dossia's chief technology officer, the group — which consists of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Intel Corp., AT&T Inc. and five other large companies — is back up off the mat and plans to make the Web-based health records system broadly available to employees of its founding members later this year.

CTO Dave Hammond said at Computerworld's annual Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference here yesterday that the consortium also has started trying to entice other employers to join the group. And in the spring, Dossia plans to publish an API for the system and accelerate its efforts to get health care providers to agree to input the medical records of patients.

Some providers already have signed on, Hammond said, but he declined to identify them because the deals have yet to be announced. He noted that initially, the consortium is targeting health care organizations in geographic areas where its founding members have large numbers of employees.

Hammond, who is vice president of enterprise IT at Dossia member Cardinal Health Inc., acknowledged that the health records system "is still in a formative stage." But he vowed that the technology will work, and claimed that it will improve the ability of patients to manage their own health care by giving them a central storage point for their records, which they then will be able to share with multiple doctors.

Patients will also be able to use the system to compare costs and medical-outcome histories at different hospitals, based on the medical records of other individuals who agree to let their data be searched anonymously, Hammond said. That should help to "materially" reduce overall health care costs, he added.

The system being built by Dossia "is sort of like a virtual shoe box that you can save all your medical records in and cart around with you," Hammond said. "We've left this [data] in the hands of medical professionals for so long. We need to give some of that control back to [patients.]"

Dossia originally planned to make the system available to the employees of its founding members by the middle of last year. But in July, the consortium's development agreement with the Portland, Ore.-based Omnimedix Institute fell apart, throwing the project into disarray.

In September, Dossia announced a new deal (download PDF) with Children's Hospital Boston, where a group of researchers had developed Indivo, a so-called personally controlled health record technology. Hammond said a team of 20 people culled from Dossia's member companies is now working at a facility in Cambridge, Mass., to adapt Indivo for use by the consortium.

Dossia is replacing the open-source database used by Children's with a commercial product that Hammond wouldn't identify. He said the group is also doing development work aimed at enabling the health record system to scale "so it can support millions of people." In addition, the Dossia team is implementing "a very granular security model" that will enable patients to specify who can and can't access their data, down to the level of specific medical tests or immunizations, Hammond said.

Electronic Data Systems Corp. will host the medical records database for Dossia, which in December began a pilot deployment with about 50 workers at each of its members. "We really wanted to start small," said Hammond, who is among the first users of the system. "This is a crawl-before-you-walk exercise."

That's largely because of the "monumental" security and privacy issues created by the project, he added. To try to ensure that only patients and the health care professionals they designate can access the medical records, Dossia is encrypting the data at both the application and database levels. It also is storing identifying information in a separate database, apart from the medical records themselves.

In addition to Wal-Mart, Intel, AT&T and Cardinal Health, which sells medical instruments and supplies as well as health care software products, Dossia's current members include Applied Materials Inc., BP America Inc., Pitney Bowes Inc. and Sanofi-Aventis U.S. LLC.

Richard Gius, CIO at Atmos Energy Corp. in Dallas, previously ran IT at Cardinal Health. Gius wouldn't say whether Atmos is looking at joining Dossia, but he said that he thinks "every company" should be interested in the consortium's technology.

"Companies always talk a good game about empowering their employees," Gius said, adding that the Dossia system will provide workers with "a tool that not only gives them more information but lets them control that information."