The Health Data Exchange initiative that Duke University announced last week may be the impetus the industry needs to move forward on electronic medical records, healthcare IT leaders say.

It will at least be one shot in the arm, among several others.

The data exchange will be launched by Duke's Fuqua School of Business. Under a national electronic health information network, patients would provide their medical histories to the network through an Internet site. Anonymous medical histories would then be made available to medical providers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and other segments of the health care industry.

"Lots people are looking at this (the EMR) as a fully-formed human being, instead of an infant that needs to be nurtured," said David M. Cutler, professor of economics at Harvard University and a member of the Institute of Medicine. Cutler is author of "Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System."

Cutler sees the effort by Duke as a step that might raise consumer awareness of the benefits and also spur more efforts, all of which will contribute to the establishment of a national health network.

"You can't in the end have 20 flowers blooming," Cutler said.

Dan Rode, vice president of policy and government relations at AHIMA (American Health Information Management Association), agrees that every initiative helps the push to an electronic record and a shared system. He predicts there will be several more efforts similar or complementary to Duke's. There are a couple of regional projects already, he said, notably one in Santa Barbara, Calif. and another in Indianapolis. "There will be several more," he said. "There's grant money for projects to exchange information."

Sumit Nagpal, CEO of Wellogic, a healthcare software firm in Cambridge, Mass., says Duke's plan will help build political support and consumer support. He sees the plan as piggy-backing on others already in the works. "It's at the very least likely to validate those efforts," he said.

While the Duke effort is likely to have a net positive effect, said Rode, healthcare leaders must not lose sight of the fact nothing useful will occur without standards.

"While we have the technology to do this, the bottom line is if we don't have standardized information, it's worthless. Without standards we could be exchanging garbage."

Although the concept of an electronic health record has been around for nearly four decades, little progress has been made toward that end due to a lack of market demand, said Brian Baum. Baum is former chief marketing officer of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's Health Practice. Baum will be heading up the initiative with Ed Hammond, professor emeritus of community and family medicine at the Medical Center and former president of the American Medical Informatics Association. Fuqua's new initiative aims to increase market demand by giving consumers a better understanding of the information network's potential benefits and by motivating people to submit personal health information to the exchange, Baum said.