A recent article on federal efforts to automate health records mentions a rather unlikely partner: the US Postal Service. The article quotes Karen DeSalvo, the national coordinator for Health Information Technology as telling a health IT conference this week that the USPS is “making a personal health record and a portal so they can access their [employees’] health information”:

DeSalvo said ONC [Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT] is planning to leverage the United States Postal Service as a pilot to experiment with new health record interoperability.

“They have hundreds of thousands of employees for whom they are making a personal health record and a portal so they can access their health information,” she said. “They also have a potential platform to create a way that every American has an identifier, like an address” they registered online.

Read more: Are the keys to interoperable health IT hidden outside the health care field? – FedScoop.