The much ballyhooed, employer-driven PHR consortium, Dossia, has chosen Boston-based Children’s Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP) as its technology partner for the creation of an employer sponsored PHR platform. The partnership with CHIP comes after a falling out this past July between Dossia and its former technology partner, Omnimedix Institute.

Dossia has made a good choice in CHIP as a partner for CHIP has already created a PHR called Indivo that while seeing only limited deployment since its release in 2001, has received favorable reviews. Omnimedix on the other hand had nothing but PowerPoints.

The Dossia Consortium, which now includes Applied Materials, AT&T, BP, Cardinal Health, Intel, Pitney Bowes, sanofi-aventis, and Wal-Mart, made a better choice in CHIP than their previous one. Omnimedix may have had the desire to create a PHR for Dossia, but they are a small, a relatively unproven entity and arguably not up to the task of creating a PHR platform to serve the projected 5 million plus employees, retirees and their dependents of these large companies.

CHIP, a joint research consortium of MIT and Harvard Medical’s Children’s Hospital to be its technology partner, has been doing research on the subject for more than a decade and introduced what they refer to as a PCHR for Personally Controlled Health Record, originally called PING in 2001. The developers of this PHR have firmly held that the consumer should have complete control of their health records, thus they have put it right in to the acronym for this application.

Now referred to as Indivo, the software application is a free, open source application with a flexible XML schema for data sharing via open standards. More info can be found at the IndivoHealth website.