Wayne Wilson wrote: > I don't know whether this has been covered before or not, but the > Dossia announcement is making some waves among the US provider > community, especially those of us at the starting gate with patient > portals. > > http://www.omnimedix.org > > Does anyone know the technical strategy here? This would be a prime > candidate to re-use open source work on health care records, but I > see little to no indications of that. The major employers forming > the core consortium funding this effort; Walmart, Intel, BP have been > involved in the open source world themselves, but since work is being > done by Omnimedix, using technical people from the 'financial > industry' (this is revealed in their press release and is supposed to > make us feel good about security of the system) I wonder....... > > Is this yet another large scale, US led consortium effort that will > end up mixed up in proprietary software? Or in systems that are > described as 'open' but are closed unless you pay a fee?
They may soon have some very serious competition, judging from these blog entries and the conference address referred to in the second one: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/health-care-information-matters.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/thoughts-on-health-care-continued.html An interesting prospect, if Google repeats what it has done in the past. Certainly it has the technical infrastructure to host a huge-scale EHR without raising a sweat, and it has demonstrated the technical capacity to design consumer-oriented Web-based applications which are at once easy-to-use and surprisingly sophisticated. But most interesting has been Google's willingness to expose APIs to its Web applications, which allow many third-party value-added flowers to bloom. If they provided an API like the one for Google Maps for Google EHR, then many interesting things might be possible, with space made for lots of open source tools to add value. However, at the end of the day, Google is a highly profitable corporation which needs to make money, and the key question for it will be how to make money from a consumer-facing EHR, given that targetted advertising by pharmaceutical companies and suppliers, or medical and health service suppliers (and even malpractice suit attorneys..., or quacks and charletons with magic cures), would be either transgressing advertising laws or sailing rather close to the ethical wind. Alternatively, Google (or Amazon, another company with massive Web-oriented IT resources) might just provide technical infrastructure (in the form of a Web-based EHR platform and the hosting of it) which is leased or sold or even given for free to community-based or other consortia of health core providers, or to employer groups, or whatever - so not just one Google EHR, but many. And not supported by advertising, or perhaps not so much. Much speculation is possible, but it seems likely that Google will get into the Web-based consumer EHR game before too long - it can't ignore the health care sector, given that it eats up nearly 15% of the US GDP and accounts for increasing proportions of GDP in other rich nations. Tim C
