Five U.S. companies that provide healthcare coverage for 2.5 million employees, retirees and dependents plan to offer an interoperable electronic health record system beginning in mid-2007. The companies — Applied Materials (Santa Clara, California), BP America (Los Angeles, California), Intel (Santa Clara, California), Pitney Bowes (Stamford, Connecticut) and Wal-Mart (Bentonville, Arkansas) each contributed about $1.5 million toward development of the Dossia system.

The companies said the system eventually could lower healthcare costs by billions of dollars annually by reducing medical errors, improving management of chronic conditions, eliminating duplicate services and creating other efficiencies. The Omnimedix Institute (Portland, Oregan) would operate the Dossia.

Dossia is designed to accept manually or electronically inputted data from existing health records, and users can add their personal family health histories to their records. Users can enter their health records on their own, or the system can automatically collect data from pharmacies, physicians, hospitals, insurers or other electronic sources. Images, such as X-rays, also can be entered into the system. Records in the system can be printed or electronically transferred, and users would be able to continue to use the records if they change employers, health plans or providers, according to the companies.