PHR on Steroids

Dossia, a consortium of large employers, recently announced plans to add several new features to its personal health record (PHR) platform, InformationWeek reports. Dossia CEO Mike Critelli said the new Dossia Health Manager will be an "intelligent" system that incorporates gaming and social networking principles to facilitate "sustained user engagement and behavior change" (Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek, 7/20). According to Dossia, the new platform will provide telehealth services with physicians who can access and input data into a patient's PHR during the consultation. Employers might choose to subsidize the telehealth service under various cost-sharing arrangements, depending on their benefit plan. The new PHR system also will offer: 1) Access to a physician search tool; 2) Analytics that can suggest certain health initiatives based on a user's PHR data; 3) An enhanced vaccine tracker that provides alerts when users are due for immunizations; and 4) Wellness-based social networking tools. This new PHR platform is expected to be available later this year (Goedert, Health Data Management, 7/20).
Dossia is a Personal health record service offered by some of the largest employers in the United States. It is one of the largest PHR deployments in the world. Dossia is based on Open Source software and was initially released in the summer of 2009. Dossia differs from traditional by providing user access to health information regardless of health plan, employer or physician. Users also have the ability to download their full record, in electronic form, at any time. It is an initiative formed from the following companies: AT&T, Applied Materials, BP America, Cardinal Health, Intel, Pitney Bowes, Sanofi-aventis, Walmart, Abraxis BioScience, Vanguard Health Systems. Given the number of employees of these combined institutions, Dossia could be one of the largest PHR systems in the world.