Cardinal Health to help fund medical records database

Cardinal Health, a leading health care company, has signed on to fund Dossia, a medical records database that tracks people's medical records over their lifetime. The Web-based database can aggregate things like forms, test results and images from multiple sources. Dossia was built by the Omnimedix Institute, a nonprofit organization that is funded by Applied Materials, BP America, Intel, Pitney Bowes and Wal-Mart. Cardinal Health, which is No. 19 on the Fortune 500 and employs over 55,000 people, is joining with those funding companies as a member of the Dossia Founders Group.

Dossia is set to launch in mid-2007. About 2.5 million U.S. employees, dependents and retirees of the funding companies will be offered access to it. They will have the option to opt-in to Dossia and will maintain control over what data is shared and who has access to it. IBM recently unveiled a Dossia alternative called the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) as part of its contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop a digital system for medical records. The NHIN search engine works with existing standards-based medical records networks.