Microsoft launches ‘Health Vault’ for personal electronic health records

Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled its ‘Health Vault’, to store all its customers’ health data, ranging from test results to doctors’ reports to daily measurements of weight or blood pressure, online. Customers then have access to those records any time, anywhere, via the Internet and in keeping with Microsoft’s promise to make storing data on the Internet just as secure as keeping it in a bank.

Several dozen manufacturers, hospitals and charities have signed up for Health Vault. Big names including the American heart, diabetes and lung associations, the New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Omron and Texas Instruments, in addition to various firms devoted to the craze for “wellness”, are now on board and are expected to announce products and services shortly.

The service is offered free to customers and Microsoft is relying on earning revenues from targeted searches performed by the customers. Microsoft is attempting to differentiate the targeted search service from Google and Yahoo! through its ‘vertical search’ approach. In order to attract any users in the first place however, Microsoft has promised to enforce strict privacy rules. These would preclude such data-mining – Source: “The vault is open”, The Economist, Oct 4th 2007, www.economist.com

This development is consistent with eClinic’s point of view that a sophisticated, commercially oriented information supply chain is required to enable personal electronic health records. Melbourne based, eClinic, envisages that a variety of organisations will need to play the traditional roles of manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers. Acting primarily with the customer’s consent, the supply chain will need to collectively gather the disparate components that make up a customer’s personal electronic health record, collate the information into a coherent whole and provide value-added services (eg through Microsoft’s targeted search service).

However, eClinic also contends that the components of the personal electronic health record will need to be sourced in an automated manner, rather than relying on customers or even healthcare practitioners to manually update it.