Briefs

Privacy advocate sees further erosion medical record confidentiality BY Bob Brewin, March 1, 2007

The Defense Department has signed an agreement with Microsoft under which the software vendor will help develop tools and methods for analyzing the department's 9.1 million electronic patient records to find better ways to manage the health of DOD beneficiaries.

Under the cooperative research and development agreement, Microsoft will work with the Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center to extract, store and analyze data stored in DOD’s Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA) electronic health record system.

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Microsoft and the Army center aim to develop a clinical data warehouse (CDW) that provides predefined queries of interest to clinicians and analysts. The warehouse also will support data mining, which uses clustering and pattern recognition techniques to discover previously unknown correlations in the data. Intel and HP are providing support on security, sizing, and scalability testing of the CDW architecture, Microsoft said.

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