CAMBRIDGE, MA – Without aggressive action, personal health record platforms Dossia and Google Health may be in danger of fading into the background, according to an analyst.

Dossia and Google Health, along with Microsoft HealthVault, are the top players in PHR platforms.

The main difference between Dossia and Microsoft HealVault is that they are built on two different operating models, with two different customer bases, said John Moore, founder and managing partner of healthcare IT analyst firm Chilmark Research, based in Cambridge, Mass. While HealthVault is targeted more toward the clinical space, Dossia's purpose is to serve the employees of its founding members.

Vanguard Health System, a Nashville, Tenn.-based healthcare company announced earlier this month that it plans to roll out Dossia to its employees, making it the second Dossia founder - after Wal-Mart - to implement the platform.

The Dossia Consortium is made up of nine other Fortune 500 companies: Applied Materials, AT&T, BP America, Cardinal Health, Intel, Pitney Bowes, Abraxis BioScience, sanofi-aventis and Wal-Mart.

In September 2008, Wal-Mart carried out the inaugural deployment of the Dossia PHR, which Moore referred to as a "birthing pain" for the company. He said the platform needed additional work to scale to such a large enterprise, which slowed adoption. 

Governance issues have also contributed to delays in moving the platform forward, he said.

"The founding members have a lot of needs they want to see come out of this company."

However Moore believes Dossia will begin to ramp up more aggressively in the next 6-12 months. 

"The bigger question is what is Google Health doing?" said Moore.

He says Google Health needs to sign on with some significant partners in order to gain visibility and show that they are still a player in the market.

"Right now I just don't get that feeling," he says.