Dossia was launched last December and signed a deal with nonprofit start-up Omnimedix, which Dossia funded and named as the prime contractor in building the system from scratch.

But problems began only a few months into the deal, with both parties heading to court with complaints that Dossia missed scheduled payments to Omnimedix and that Omnimedix missed project milestones. The conflict is being privately arbitrated. Dossia president Colin Evans wouldn't comment on the Omnimedix case.

Now Dossia is starting fresh via a new partnership with Children's Hospital Boston, which is providing technological and strategic guidance to Dossia. The company will base its personal health record system on "the underlying capabilities" of Indivo, a system that Children's Hospital built for its patients in 1998.

Among the appeal of Children's Hospital's Indivo to Dossia is that the open source system provides control over health record data to patients. That's the plan as the system is adapted for use by workers of Dossia-member companies, who also include British Petroleum, Pitney Bowes, Cardinal Health, Applied Materials, and the two latest founding members, AT&T and Sanofi-Aventis, who quietly joined the alliance several months ago, but publicly announced their participation only now.

Dossia and Children's Hospital will build upon the Indivo platform, scaling it up for the more than 2.5 million U.S. employees, retirees, and dependents of Dossia founding members who'll have access to the system. It will have a central repository to collect patient data from multiple sources, such as insurers, health plans, pharmacy benefit management companies, and labs. The system will be hosted and managed by Dossia. Access to patient data in repository will not be allowed, even in aggregate, to employers, researchers at Children's, or any third parties, without explicit consent from employees.

But with lessons learned from the soured Omnimedix relationship, Dossia founding members want to make sure the renewed effort is given the attention it needs from Dossia's side, says Evans, who also is director of policy and standards for Intel's health group. For Evans, that means spending a lot more time at Dossia; while he'll still be paid by Intel, Evans will now be Dossia's president full time.

Similarly, executives from Dossia's other founding member companies, including Wal-Mart VP of information systems Carolyn Walton (no relation to Wal-Mart's founding Walton family) and Dave Hammond, VP of enterprise IT architecture at Cardinal Health, also will be spending more time focused on Dossia as a "core executive team," says Evans.

In addition to the executive team, Dossia over the next 30 days will be adding approximately two dozen full-time and contract staff to help in the development. Children's Hospital also has a small team working on the project, says Will Crawford, director of industry relations at Children's Hospital Informatics Program and project director for the Dossia collaboration.

The original goal set out by Dossia when it launched last December was to have some Dossia members using the system by now.

But now "the target is to demo next year, and have a smallish group of early [employee] adopters in the hundreds by end of next year," says Evans. In the meantime, "the focus in 2008 will be in marketing this" to employees at Dossia member companies, he says. By this time next year, Dossia wants to have the capabilities for 1 million users.

Evans is optimistic that the system will be embraced by employees and that Dossia member companies will convince their benefit providers, health plans, insurers, and others to provide health data to the effort. "We want to say, 'we're paying the bill, get info into the hands of patients'," he says.

"There have been bumps in the road," admits Evans. "We've learned a lot about how it can be done, what can be done, and what can't be done," he says. "We underestimated the challenges." The focus now is on "doing this right."