On September 30th, 2008, Wal-Mart went live Personal Health Records through Dossia, powered by Indivo! Wal-Mart is also providing a WebMD Personal Health Application for their employees, fed by data collected by Dossia and managed within Indivo. You can read all about it in Information Week, and contact us to discuss how Indivo can power your health information exchange projects.

On September 17th, 2007, the Children's Hospital Informatics Program and the Dossia Consortium announced that they would be partnering to make the Indivo PCHR the core of the anticipated Dossia Personally Controlled Health Record system. Dossia will provide resources to extend the core Indivo functionality and server architecture, which will remain open source and freely available. CHIP will also serve as an industry adviser to Dossia as the consortium pursues development of a national PCHR ecosystem.

Indivo is a personally controlled health record system that enables patients to own complete, secure copies of their medical records. Indivo integrates health information across sites of care and over time. Indivo is built to public standards as an open-source application platform and is actively deployed in real-life settings.

The Indivo personally controlled health record differs from other PHR efforts in important ways:

• Indivo places a strict emphasis on patient control and ownership of medical information and offers the detailed technical infrastructure to provide this control. Hence we use the term "personally controlled health record" to describe Indivo.

• Indivo is an actual medical record, not a portal. (Portals, often provided by healthcare institutions, are windows through which patients can view, but not own or control, a portion of their health data stored at that institution.)

• Indivo stores fully detailed clinical encounter records, taken from either electronic systems, paper reports or patient entry. Indivo's XML-based storage allows for a flexible data model and Indivo developers are working closely with the HITSP process to ensure broad interoperability.

• Indivo's multi-level security model provides strong data security. Each record is encrypted, protecting against unauthorized access to servers or backup tapes.

• Source code for Indivo is open and freely available to all developers, enabling straightforward local customization of Indivo, as well as interoperability between Indivo and other vendor products.

• Indivo record owners can subscribe to data updates from hospital information systems, practices, and regional health information organizations (RHIOs) also known as subnetwork organizations (SNOs). Indivo records can also be registered with regional record locator services making their data available to institutions within the RHIOs/SNOs.