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IBM's answer to medical mashup: A search engine

Company unveils prototype network that would create a mashup of a patient's records.

Candace Lombardi
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.
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Candace Lombardi
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IBM has created a medical records search engine that, if implemented, would produce a mashup of an individual's records from hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories and physicians.

The company unveiled the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) on Tuesday to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. IBM had a one-year contract with the agency to develop a prototype network that would allow standards-based medical records systems to communicate with one another. The company is demonstrating the system at the Third Nationwide Health Information Network Forum this week in Washington, D.C.

In 2005, President Bush mandated that digital health records be available for use by 2014. Several groups developing technologies to that end have been caught between providing shared time- and cost-effective medical data on individual patients and populations, while protecting patients' privacy.

The IBM project differs from other medical records management systems in development in that it is a communications network among various medical database systems, rather than a centralized database, according to Tom Romeo, the director of federal health care at IBM's Global Business Services.

IBM's prototype network searches medical databases connected to it for patient information by name, date of birth and address. Security for the system is based on HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) standards, according to Romeo, and the data is only imported for view if the system finds an exact match.

The system, which is currently being tested at seven hospitals and 24 physicians' offices, requires patient authorization for a search to be performed. The data is only available for a one-time view at the time of search, remaining on the networks of the hospitals' and physicians' systems where it was originally stored. The system is software and hardware "agnostic," according to IBM, and "adheres to open standards" so that different systems can connect through it.

NHIN could also allow government regulatory agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention access to data--in which patients' identities would be kept secret--for studying medical trends, according to Romeo.