ATLANTA – Dossia's news that two more founders are using its PHR, coincides with Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault's announcements about their latest offerings at the HIMSS10 conference in Atlanta.
Last month, John Moore, founder and managing partner of healthcare IT analyst firm <a href="/directory/chilmark-research" target="_blank" class="directory-item-link">Chilmark Research, based in Cambridge, Mass., said Dossia and Google Health would require "aggressive action" or they would be in danger of fading into the background.
Colin Evans, CEO and president of Dossia said the non-profit organization is working "aggressively" to get all of its founders onboard with the platform this year. He also expects this year to "go beyond" the founders and extend the platform to other companies.
Officials at global technology provider Pitney Bowes and San Jose, Calif.-based Intel just announced they are rolling out the Dossia PHR to a select group of their employees. The companies are members of the Dossia Consortium, which is made up of ten Fortune 500 companies. Intel plans to extend the platform to all employees by April 2010, said officials.
Evans says companies like Intel and Pitney Bowes are using the platform as a launching point for their wellness programs.
"We are squarely focused on the needs of employers and employees. We want to empower them to take care of their own health...The industry will respond when the people paying the bills step us and become more demanding," said Evans.
Alfred Spector, vice president of research and special projects at Google, wrote on the company's blog on March 1, that the company has been exploring ways to "make Google Health more useful and relevant to a broad set of consumers on a daily basis."
He said Google will be demonstrating what they have been working on at HIMSS.
"We've learned over these past two years that getting a current and past medication history assembled and ready in case of emergencies is one of the strongest value propositions for using an online Personal Health Record (PHR). So today at HIMSS, we're announcing an integration with Surescripts, the leading electronic prescribing network in the United States, to help accelerate the availability of prescription drug history to our users," he wrote.
Spector also announced an integration project with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) that aims at "giving patients the ability to add health information to an EHR maintained by doctors using their own Google Health PHR." As well as three other integration partners: Citizen Memorial Healthcare (CMH), a rural healthcare network in southwest Missouri, Boxford, Mass.-based integration consultant, Iatric Systems, which can facilitate Google Health integrations for hospitals and healthcare systems, and the Withings WiFi Body Scale, which allows users to automatically send their weight data to Google Health.
At HIMSS10 on Monday, officials at Microsoft HealthVault announced its Community Connect, a new software solution for hospitals expected to be available by the third quarter of 2010. The new software enables hospitals to give patients and referring physicians access, after discharge, to electronic copies of the patient's personal health data generated at the hospital. It will also allow patients to preregister for hospital appointments online using their electronic personal health information to populate hospital forms in advance.
"With HealthVault Community Connect, we are targeting one of the fundamental gaps in the care process - the lack of electronic information flow between the hospital, the patient and the patient's care team outside the hospital," said David Cerino, general manager, Microsoft Health Solutions Group. "By allowing patients and their personal physicians to access electronic copies of their discharge instructions, for example, hospitals can facilitate better health outcomes by getting the relevant information into the hands of the people who need it most."
