IBM To Launch Electronic Medical-Record-Sharing Project [ or ebIBM ]

April 27, 2005 by Charles Babcock, InformationWeek

Use of transferable electronic medical records could cut health-care spending by 10%, experts say.

IBM wants to help pave the way for the free exchange of electronic health-care records that today are trapped in hundreds of disparate hospital, physician, and health insurance systems.

<ed.note>I conjecture that what this article leaves out is that Boaz Carmeli at Haifa and Iris Eiron at Almaden are both investigating ebxml registry (specifically the freebxml.org distro, OMAR) as a foundational component of "the Interoperable Health Information Infrastructure" since in Eiron's words "[t]he IHE XDS specification contain numerous references to ebXML RIM and RS version 2.0."</ed.note>

By the end of the year, IBM will launch a pilot system, the Interoperable Health Information Infrastructure, that will link IBM sites in San Jose, Calif.; Rochester, Minn. (home of the Mayo Clinic); and Haifa, Israel, to demonstrate how electronic medical records based on open standards could move from one health-care provider to another and follow a patient around the world.

"Our test bed will model the world of the future. We'll have both real and simulated data for 200 million individuals, with the resulting message flow," said James Kaufman, research manager for health-care information at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose. Kaufman was interviewed during a forum called Transforming Healthcare with Information this week at the San Jose facility.