Employer group offers patient control of health records

Dossia, a big business consortium which is anxious to move health care reform forward, added AT&T to its roster of members, all of whom are backing a patient-controlled health record system called Indivo.

Indivo was designed to allow integration across sites and payment systems, and for international use. It's a government-backed format, created with grants from the National Library of Medicine, a unit of NIH, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, previously known as the CDC.

The format itself is nothing special, and it does meet all the main criticisms made here about electronic health records. What it lacks, so far, is a lot of buy-in from the medical community, specifically from individual doctors.

Is that because such buy-in was not sought, or because it was refused? Dossia has been hard at work since 1998. It's no secret. If a patient-controlled health record scheme can't be approved by the industry, what can?