Peer to peer: Sharing patient data online

One company promises cheaper, easier sharing of information as it tries to become the Napster of health care. But is this something physicians will buy?

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. March 12, 2001.

You need the results of all tests and a list of all medications other physicians have prescribed for one of your patients during the past six months.

So you log on to a computer. You learn that a group practice, a laboratory, two hospitals and two pharmacies around town have eight records matching your criteria. You click on a hypertext link for each record, and -- boom!

You're connected and able to download the data you need directly from the computers of those entities. You're now ready to treat the patient in your office.

That scenario may sound exciting, scary or merely far-off. But thanks to a new technology called peer-to-peer file sharing, obtaining clinical data as easily as that is moving closer to reality.

CareScience Inc., a 9-year-old Internet health care company led by physicians, is developing a peer-to-peer product, Care Data Exchange, that it says will enable physicians and other providers to securely share clinical information among themselves over the Internet without having to invest in expensive servers or central computers.

The phrase "peer-to-peer" came into vogue with the development of firms such as the controversial music-sharing site Napster.

Here's how peer-to-peer works: Instead of having to place all shared files on a central database or server, members of a peer-to-peer network can pull those files off of each other's individual computers and access them through the Internet.

For example, under CareScience's model, a physician could link up with data in hospitals, laboratories, other practices and elsewhere -- and vice versa. But all of those groups would be restricted to a certain network and certain files, so no one outside the network could randomly pull patient files. [...]