Giant firms plan health data warehouse

Healthcare industry, meet the strong arm of Wall Street. A group of U.S. and European giants, including Intel, Wal-Mart and British Petroleum, plan to take a major element of the U.S. healthcare IT system into their own hands, building a giant joint data warehouse linking hospital, physician and pharmacy data. The giant firms expect doctors and hospitals to make nice and share data with them, or risk losing their business. Such requirements aren't very surprising: Wal-Mart, for one, is well-known for demanding harsh terms from its retail supply chain partners. Hell, healthcare folks are getting off easy!

While the companies haven't released their exact plans yet, the word is that they'll begin by announcing a joint records standard (What, we need another one? Oh, and with Intel involved, I think we can safely assume it won't be an open source standard.) Later, ten members of the coalition expect to spend about $1.5 million each to create the warehouse. One of their many goals for the project is to slash the estimated 40 percent of administrative costs generated by lost or incorrect information and duplicate tests. If they accomplish this, $1.5 million will prove to have been a laughably small investment.

Find out what big employers have in mind:
- read this Wall Street Journal article

Related Article:
- HHS asks employers to embrace shared HIT standards. Article

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