HONOLULU – Lambert Onuma, president and CEO of technology vendor Convergence CT, has a vision: He wants to create a national data warehouse that connects hospitals, clinics and medical groups, allowing them to share information, analyze results and gain best-practice insight.

And the American Medical Group Association in Alexandria, Va., is
giving Onuma the chance to do it.

In mid-January, AMGA – representing nearly 300 medical groups serving 50 million patients in 42 states – awarded Convergence a 10-year contract valued at more than $350 million to build a national warehouse. The goal: Give AMGA’s 75,000 member physicians access to a large pool of data for comparison and analysis, such as by disease, by treatment and by operation.

“Providers benefit because they can compare themselves against other organizations,” said Onuma, a co-founder of Convergence in 2001 with George Ariyoshi, the former governor of Hawaii. “And AMGA can look across the entire membership and begin to get margins in line and provide methods that become best practices.”

The information won’t just help physicians. Stripped of patient identifiers to ensure privacy, aggregated data can also be used by pharma companies for clinical-trial feasibility studies and outcomes-analyses. Or by the FDA to monitor adverse drug reactions. Or by patients to make decisions about their  treatment. “This is real-time data that’s updated every day,” Onuma said.

While healthcare-information sharing is nothing new – to say nothing of widespread use of claims documents – there has yet to be a large-scale, high-caliber initiative that crunches clinical data, affording best-practice benchmarks. (Convergence has experience building a commercial warehouse, albeit not with a large number of medical groups across one organization.)

The company, which is establishing similar networks in Europe and Japan, plans to have 12 AMGA medical groups – representing several hundred clinics and 20 to 30 hospitals – linked by the end of 2006, and to connect the entire membership over the next few years.

Headquartered in Honolulu, Convergence has offices in Pleasanton, Calif., Philadelphia and Tokyo, and recently opened a European branch in Berlin. It’s now considering Chicago as its data-processing center.

“There’s a lot of good we can bring to the country in putting up this network,” said Onuma, who plans to employ 200 – compared to 25 now – by the end of 2007. “We are very focused and committed to pull this off.”

Jeffrey L. Hill, CEO of Anceta, a subsidiary of AMGA that led the search for an IT partner, says Convergence landed the deal with technical know-how, passion – and a commitment to confidentiality.

“How do you effectively share and pool data across entities? It’s a matter of trust, not just technology,” Hill said. “Everyone needs to feel comfortable that someone is looking out for the rights of the patients.”