By Matthew Holt

JD Kleinke and Omnimedix are still in business and still fighting a pretty serious lawsuit
about the Dossia breakup. I talked with JD yesterday. The team is working on several super secret client projects, but it’s tough to run a small consulting shop and keep a protracted lawsuit open, so they’re passing the hat! Why keep the lawsuit going?

Well, there’s obviously stuff that JD couldn’t tell me, so this is speculation but it’s clear that this is much more than an a “vendor didn’t deliver/client didn’t pay” dispute. JD was always very vocal about an open nonprofit being the protector of the Dossia members’ employees’ data, so I surmise that contractual disputes about who got access to what data are at the root of this. It would be interesting (if practicably impossible) to compare Dossia’s contact with Omnimedix in their contract with Indivo.

More generally, JD and I talked about whether there’s a need for a Dossia-type entity when there’s Google Health and HealthVault. Here’s what JD said about Microsoft and Google’s privacy stance.

“In both cases they’ve violated their own operating principles as businesses to do the right thing.”

But while he likes their model and has lots of respect for their
credibility on privacy JD suggests one more thing—they need to be
interoperable with each other. Then they’d both be able to share each
other’s partnerships. (You’ll be hearing more about this at Health 2.0.)

Finally, I asked JD that with Healthvault, Google Health and others
out there, if there was still a need for a nonprofit unaffliliated
with employers to provide a nationwide PHR. He said yes
and thinks some people won’t trust any corporation and that
Ominmedix could still build the read-only interface into every source
of health data for a mere $15 million.

Will we see a Foundation bite? I wonder, but many have wasted lots more money on less worthwhile ventures.