A group of employers including AT&T, Applied Materials, BP, Cardinal Health, Intel, Pitney-Bowes, and Walmart has created Dossia.org, an Internet-based personal health record.
Open to employees of the partner companies and their families and dependents, Dossia is designed to be “a lifelong personal health record” that its users “own and control.” A goal is for Dossia to be accessible to members when they change jobs. Dossia is independent of its founding companies, so neither employers nor insurance companies will have access to individuals’ files.
According to its Web site, the Dossia system will enable individuals to gather their medical data from multiple sources and create and utilize their own personal, private, and portable electronic health records. Initial data are likely to come from insurers’ databases and the patient’s own annotations. As the system develops, additional information will come directly from the patient’s medical chart.
After the initial development period, the Dossia technology platform will be made available to software developers so they can create applications that encourage the adoption of electronic personal health records far beyond the original employee groups.
Dossia’s technology will be built to public standards using source code that is open and freely available to all developers.
— Sharon J. Watson
