ATLANTA – Israeli company dbMotion is bent on doing for U.S. healthcare what it did in Israel – connect the key players so they can share critical medical information anytime, anywhere.

To that end, the company recently established a U.S. division in Atlanta and teamed up with the Cleveland Clinic and other major Ohio hospitals for government money to fund a model network. The company is waiting to hear if it will be among the vendors selected.

The Office of the National Health Information Technology Coordinator has promised to award as many as six one-year contracts for developing a prototype for a national healthcare information network. Officials plan to announce the contracts by the end of October, a spokeswoman for office said Friday.

Hospitals and physicians around the country are forming regional health information networks, which industry leaders view as one day becoming part of a national network.

dbMotion executives say they have a leg up on how to make a national network work the way it should. In Israel, dbMotion linked healthcare providers at 18 hospitals and 1,000 clinics, providing them real-time access to medical records for the majority of the Israeli population.

"Our technology was designed to solve a problem that Israel has, and we think it's the same problem the U.S. has," said Peter van der Grinten, general manager of dbMotion's U.S. subsidiary. van der Grinten and his colleagues tout the dbMotion network, based on the company's Virtual Patient Record Technology, as the first system of its kind in the world.

dbMotion creates secured Virtual Patient Records by logically connecting a group of care providers and organizations without centralizing their data, van der Grinten explained. It enables authorized medical staff to retrieve medical information on demand – and its deployment is achieved without the necessity of replacing existing information systems, he said.

Decentralization of data is a critical component to dbMotion's approach to creating a national network. Security is one of the main concerns in establishing a national network to share medical information, said Victor Plavner, MD, chairman and CEO for the Maryland/DC collaborative for health information technology.

People involved in creating regional networks all seem to be moving to what Plavner called a "distributed, federated" approach, keeping clinical data at its source and directing the authorized user to where the information is.

decentralized approach translates into tighter security, Plavner said, and it was an approach that dbMotion had from the start. "They did it first," he said.

"We can apply lessons learned in Israel," said van der Grinten. "Who's more interested in security than Israel? I think we have that one licked."

Plavner and van der Grinten agree that another key factor in building a successful network is showing its value.

"We really want to demonstrate that return on investment." van der Grinten said. "These bids have to demonstrate an ongoing business model."

"If you don't have a sustainable business model," Plavner said, "then ultimately you're dead."