The non-profit consortium Dossia has branded itself as a provider of digital health records focused on ease of use for the consumer. The organization got started in 2006 to offer the Web-based records to employees at its member companies—like BP America, Intel, Pitney Bowes, and Wal-Mart—and has racked up plenty of data on patients’ doctors visits, pharmacy orders, and insurance claims.

Now Dossia wants to make all that data more accessible. Earlier this month, the Cambridge, MA-based consortium announced a push to make the data it stores more accessible for patients and their families, by integrating its product with Denver, CO-based Health Language, a provider of technology for integrating medical terminology and coding with healthcare software. The company did not disclose financial details of the partnership.

“Ultimately, the partnership is very significant because it signifies that we are a consumer controlled solution, said Dossia CEO Michael Critelli in a phone conversation. “It gives patients access even when they’re not in a doctor’s office.”

The integration with Health Language’s translation engine will help Dossia, which has largely focused on electronically storing and processing insurance claims and pharmacy data for patients, focus more on connecting patients with information from doctor’s visits and lab test results, by converting it to a “more user friendly state.”

“Over time we will see some capabilities to translate lab data and other primary data that is today not as prominent in the record as it will be,” Critelli says.

Existing forms for insurance claims data contain a number of differentiating codes for medical services—like administering medicine through an IV versus a pill—that help insurers determine how to pay, but aren’t necessarily important to the patient. Dossia will focus on sifting through these codes and administrative details to bring patients (and their families) access to information that will help them manage their care. “What they really want to know is how much medication is administered to me, what are its side effects, and what is it supposed to do,” says Critelli.

“We’re going to take medical terminology and convert it to plain language. We’ll take coding and medical jargon created for one purpose, and translate it for another: healthcare management.”

The technology will be fully integrated with Dossia’s health records in four months or so, in time for fall enrollments. Dossia is working on getting more of its member companies fully set up with the personal health records for their employees (it currently has six out of the 10 enrolled). Earlier this year, former Xconomy correspondent Ryan McBride wrote that Dossia had a for-profit arm that was looking for outside financing to expand. That process is continuing, and the consortium says improvements such as the Health Language integration are helping it pitch to investors.

“We have gotten some very good feedback from prospective investors that we are going to be a long-term player,” Critelli says. “We’re in the process of updating our offering and sharing it with investors as we go.”

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Hillsboro, OR-based Kryptiq announced today it has sold off its health plan network management software, called Choreo, to Blue Bell, PA-based Portico Systems. Financial terms were not released, but Kryptiq is using proceeds from the sale to expand its core services for healthcare providers. Kryptiq’s collaborative software lets providers share healthcare information with patients, labs, pharmacies, and colleagues.

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Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

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It was almost exactly a year ago that Microsoft launched its HealthVault service, a secure online database for users to store and manage their medical records. And in recent months, we’ve reported on the software giant’s increasing efforts in health care, including its new partnerships with prescription drug provider CVS Caremark and Boston, MA-based health startup American Well. Now, Microsoft is teaming up with San Diego-based Scripps Health to study the long-term effects of personal genome testing on health and lifestyle.

The study, which is co-sponsored by the Bay Area firms Affymetrix and Navigenics, seeks to do genetic scans on as many as 10,000 people affiliated with the non-profit Scripps Health system. The scans and analysis will tell participants about their genetic risk for health conditions like diabetes, obesity, heart attack, and certain types of cancer. But the point of the study is to follow what happens after that: will participants change their lifestyle to combat their newfound health risks, and if so, how? The plan is to track their behaviors over 20 years using detailed questionnaires and periodic health surveys. To protect the privacy of users, the identifying information on their saliva samples and questionnaires will be “encrypted and kept in a secure database,” according to Scripps.

What’s in it for Microsoft? Participants will be able to store their clinical and lifestyle information in a Microsoft HealthVault account, and access it or share it with health care providers. “This collaboration is a significant step forward in empowering people to proactively address their specific individual health needs, as well as give clinical researchers access to a broader pool of genetic data to develop new disease treatments,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s health solutions group, in a statement.

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The face of online health care is changing in Massachusetts—and probably for the better. Today one of the state’s leading health insurance companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA), announced that it has signed an agreement to integrate with the Google Health platform. It is the first health insurance company to do so.

Google Health, a free service that patients can use to organize their health information online, launched in the U.S. last month with a list of provider partners that includes the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (as we reported here), Cleveland Clinic, Walgreens, and CVS/CareMark.

The integration is supposed to be finished sometime this fall, at which time Google Health will be offered to BCBSMA members. The service will allow members to store and manage their medical records and health info (including insurance claims) in one secure location, download their prescription history from other connected providers such as pharmacies and doctors’ offices, and search for a doctor or hospital online.

You wouldn’t necessarily expect a huge insurance company to be quick on its feet when it comes to adopting technology, but BCBSMA has previously funded the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and is a founding member of the Massachusetts eRx Collaborative. The Google partnership should give members “easier and more portable access to their health care information,” said Steven Fox, BCBSMA’s vice president of provider network management, in a statement.

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The last time I went to the doctor was so long ago that my charts were still being kept on paper. But with initiatives like Google Health in full swing, things are changing fast. Analysts at The Diffusion Group, based in Texas, say that more than half of health care providers now use advanced mobile devices like RIM’s BlackBerry to look up patient records.

Which is where Boston-based Vaultus comes in. The MIT spinoff, which makes software that companies can use to distribute data from enterprise servers to smart phones and other mobile devices, announced last week that it is partnering with collaboration-software firm Covisint, based in Detroit, MI, to develop “mobile patient dashboards,” a new interface designed to make access to patient information faster and more secure.

The software taps into electronic records on patients’ medications, allergies, and other conditions and displays them on the small screens of physicians’ PDAs. Vaultus and Covisint haven’t released details about implementation or testing of the interface, but they did share a screenshot (above). So, does this mobile interface appeal to physicians on the go? Could it compromise patient confidentiality? How would you make it better? Let us know.

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Boston isn’t just home to a bevy of top-rated hospitals—it’s also the birthplace of medical informatics, or the storage and retrieval of health data. (The MUMPS programming language—for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System—was written in 1966 and is still one of the most widely used languages for creating database-driven clinical applications.) So it isn’t surprising that a Boston hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is one of the first two healthcare facilities to partner with Google Health, the free consumer-oriented health information management portal launched by Google yesterday.

Effective immediately, approximately 5,000 patients at BIDMC who use the hospital’s PatientSite portal and have existing Google Gmail accounts can export BIDMC records on their diagnoses, medications, and allergies to Google Health’s database, which is designed to help consumers manage their own medical records in a secure online environment. Over time, all 40,000 monthly users of PatientSite will be offered the ability to export their data to Google Health, according to John Halamka, the CIO at BIDMC, who is also a member of the Google Health Advisory Council, an unpaid group of medical professionals who advise Google on health-related product ideas and development.

“We believe that patients should be the stewards of their own data,” Halamka said in a BIDMC announcement timed to coincide with the launch of Google Health. “PatientSite is wonderful if all care is delivered at BIDMC. However, many patients have primary care doctors, specialists, labs, pharmacies, and non-traditional providers at multiple institutions. Our vision is that BIDMC patients will be able to electronically upload their diagnosis lists, medication lists and allergy lists into a Google Health account and share that information with health care providers who currently don’t have access to PatientSite.”

Halamka, who was at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA, for a media “factory tour” that served as the occassion for the health portal’s official launch, also blogged about the effort, stressing that security and privacy are “foundational” to the effort. “The privacy policy, with oversight from the Google Health Advisory Council, stipulates that data will never be transferred, sold, mined or released without specific consent of the patient,” he wrote. “Patients completely control the content and may remove it any time.”

The other hospital joining Google Health as a founding partner and allowing the importation of its electronic medical records is the Cleveland Clinic. Meanwhile, anyone with a Google account is free to manually enter health-related information such as their age, sex, height, and weight, diagnosed health conditions, medications, allergies, procedures, test results, and immunization records. They can then grant doctors and other service providers access to these records. From the Google Health site, users can also receive alerts about adverse interactions between the medicines they take, and connect to a range of online health assistance services such as a heart attack risk calculator from the American Heart Association and a diabetes monitoring tool from MyCareTeam.com.

Google Health, which has been in the works at Google for more than two years and was the subject of premature launch rumors back in February, isn’t the only health data aggregation site BIDMC is working with. The hospital also has a partnerships with Microsoft’s Health Vault portal and with Dossia, a consortium of large employers such as Wal-Mart and BP that’s assembling a system where employees, dependents, and retirees can keep lifelong electronic health records.

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