Wal-Mart, partners pilot Dossia PHR

After more than a year of wrangling--and one initial development effort gone bad--Wal-Mart and a team of fellow corporate giants are finally pilot-testing Dossia, their massive PHR effort. Right now, the pilot is tiny, including only about 20 Wal-Mart employees and an equally small handful of employees within the other partner firms. But the Dossia partners, who also include Applied Materials, AT&T, Pitney Bowes, Cardinal Health and Sanofi-Aventis, ultimately hope to extend the PHR to more than a million employees and dependents. The PHR technology used by Dossia is based on Indivo, an open-source PHR system developed by Children's Hospital Boston [1] in 1998.

Founders of Dossia must be relieved that they're finally getting into beta testing. The project had originally gotten off to a difficult start when the group's relationship with its original main development contractor, Omnimedix, fell apart in a welter of court actions [2].

To find out more about the pilot:
- read this Information Week piece [3]

Related Articles:
Giant firms to build personal health record for employees. Report [4]
Huge employee health record effort in jeopardy. Report [2]
Promoting PHR use: Is it a good idea? Report [5]
Blue plans, health industry group plan PHR. Report [6]
Banks to offer help in PHR dissemination. Report [7]
A Google vision for health data. Report [8]