Microsoft Wants To Manage Your Health Records

Published: October 10, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Have you ever been caught in the middle of the healthcare shuffle, being asked by one doctor to fetch records from another doctor? Or to deliver confusing paperwork to your health insurance provider? These little annoyances of the modern medical establishment are the basis behind a new Web site launched by Microsoft last week called HealthVault that aims to help consumers better manage their health information.

HealthVault is a multifaceted Web-based service that will allow consumers to accomplish several health-related tasks. First, it will provide a place for people to store their health information. Secondly, it will provide an interface to medical devices, such as blood pressure monitors, so users can monitor and track physical readings. Lastly, it will provide an interface to the healthcare establishment, enabling the sharing of test results over the Web, and overall helping health providers to communicate.

While the job poses many obstacles, there is definitely a big upside to consolidating health data for consumers and making it easier to manage, explains by Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft.

"People are concerned to find themselves at the center of the healthcare ecosystem today because they must navigate a complex web of disconnected interactions between providers, hospitals, insurance companies, and even government agencies," he says. "The launch of HealthVault makes it possible for people to collect their private health information on their terms, and for companies across the health industry to deliver compatible tools and services built on the HealthVault platform."

The service is currently available as a free beta, but for the full effect, it will require other participants in the medical establishment--insurance companies, healthcare providers, and everybody else in between--to adopt Microsoft's standards. So far, Microsoft has received pledges of support from 40 organizations, including NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and a host of other device manufacturers.

When the words "Microsoft" and "your sensitive health records" are used in the same sentence, "synergy" will undoubtedly be the first word that pops into your mind. But "security" can't be far behind, and Microsoft assures us that it has taken all the necessary steps to protect sensitive data, such as your cholesterol readings, from falling into the wrong hands, such as your life insurance company.

"From the beginning, we designed security into the system. It's why it's an online service," Neupert said during the HealthVault launch last week. (No, he really said that.) He explains: "It's much easier to protect an online service than it is a really distributed system. We have locked servers in a physically secure location, physically separate from all the other servers in the room, and there's only one point, one place that we have to be incredibly focused on making secure, and we've accomplished that."

Microsoft will make HealthVault free to consumers and physicians, as a way of encouraging its adoption. Revenue will be generated from selling ads to visitors of the Web site, so getting lots of traffic will be critical for Microsoft to fulfill the business plan.

In the near term, Microsoft will have its hands full convincing Americans to use software to better their physical well being. With so many people playing out fantasies while ensconced in virtual worlds like Second Life as their real waist lines expand and their real blood pressures rise, it seems borderline ludicrous to imagine that any Web site will set them on the healthy path.

But Microsoft is looking years down the road, and trying to envision how computers can help make peoples' lives better, which really is the most noble and most worthwhile goal. "The long-term promise of HealthVault, connected with devices, and connected to providers, is that having more data, and the software tools that allow us to gain insight from the data, like diet info, blood pressure combined with blood sugar, it will enable us . . . to better understand the many real-life interactions and situations, and to improve every day choices."

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