Dossia, a not-for-profit consortium of eight large employers, is slowly moving forward with its plans to provide five million employees, dependents and retirees with personal health records, Health Data Management reports.
Dossia President Colin Evans said the group is testing aspects of the infrastructure and linking data from insurers, pharmacies and other entities to a central database. Dossia's next step will be to approach provider organizations in the areas where its members' employees live to begin establishing connections to their electronic health record systems.
By the third quarter, the consortium plans to have employers roll out the full PHR to subsets of their employees, according to Evans.
Employees will be able to determine which providers can access certain data in their PHRs and will be able to enter additional information on their conditions. Employees will not be able to delete any information, but they will be permitted to add comments to it, Evans said (Health Data Management, 3/20).
Employer members of the Dossia consortium are:
- Applied Materials;
- AT&T;
- BP America;
- Cardinal Health;
- Intel;
- Pitney Bowes;
- Sanofi-Aventis; and
- Wal-Mart (iHealthBeat, 1/23).