Permanente is one year into a $4 billion, two-and-a-half-year project to replace a 10-year-old proprietary EMR system with a package from Epic Systems Corp. in Madison, Wis. By midyear, the system will hold the medical data of 2 million patients, Pearl said.

The goal of the consortium's founders is to accelerate the adoption of EMRs and the use of automated decision-support tools, said Jeff Rideout, Cisco's corporate medical director and vice president of its Internet business solutions group for health care.

The idea for the collaboration was born when the three firms started working together last fall on a project for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop a prototype of a national IT infrastructure to support the use of EMRs nationwide, he said.

Rideout said he expects the program to ensure quality health care for employees of the three vendors, many of whom are customers of member health care providers.

"We're doing this first and foremost to help people to adopt technology, but [also] with the belief that this will lead to improved outcomes and a better experience for our employees," he said.