Health IT

eDossea the latest to take electronic dental record sharing to the cloud

What cloud-based health information exchange providers like AT&T, Verizon and DR Systems are doing for […]

What cloud-based health information exchange providers like AT&T, Verizon and DR Systems are doing for health systems, eDossea aims to do for dentist offices.

The cloud-based, file-sharing and storage platform is designed specifically to enable dentists, specialists and oral surgeons to share electronic dental records in the form of patient information, X-rays and follow-up reports in a HIPAA-compliant fashion.

According to co-founder and director of business development Shawn Harrington, about half of all dentist offices have implemented electronic dental record software, and the rest should do so within the next three to five years.

Like it does in healthcare, EMR adoption for dentists can eliminate the hassle of collecting and transferring records manually when patients are referred to specialists, but it also introduces a slew of  interoperability and patient privacy issues.

When dentists or specialists join eDossea, they upload records to the cloud, where they are encrypted and stored. If dentists want to share records with another eDossea subscriber, they can grant that access through the system. If they want to share with someone who isn’t a member, they send an encrypted link that will take the receiver to where the record is stored.

At a glance, eDossea seems to closely resemble two other subscription, web-based sharing services for dentists: Dental Sharing, formed in 2010, and BrightSquid. RecordLinc is also similar, although it appears to have a more social component and is actually integrated with practice management systems.

Harrington said the system reduces interoperability issues, preserves the quality of X-rays and other images by allowing them to stay in their original file types, and relieves the HIPAA compliancy concerns associated with emailing patient records or uploading them through a nonencryped file-sharing service.

“Originally we were looking at costs, too,” Harrington said. “We didn’t realize how much of a need it was at first, but we found that specialists who couldn’t download images sent to them, instead of bothering the dentist’s office, would just retake patient X-rays, which adds more costs and for the patient means more radiation exposure.”

eDossea was launched in September 2010 with a $75,000 grant from the Iowa Department of Economic Development. Since completing beta trials and hitting the market last fall, it’s attracted users in 10 states, Canada and Australia. Harrington said the company has retained all of its customers over the past seven months and is looking to grow. The next step is attending the i2iowa Investors & Innovators Forum in April and finding some investors.

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