Microsoft Online Health Records With HealthVault

Microsoft launched HealthVault in beta, a free online repository where anyone can keep their personal health records. Meanwhile, Google Health has yet to launch, having recently lost its leader Adam Bosworth.

With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare providers. You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure monitors. The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine like Healthline’s (here is the results page for “glucose“), and lets you save your searches. Microsoft plans to make money through health-related search ads, but says it won’t target those ads to any personal data in someone’s stored medical record. Access to the site will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with healthcare providers. Patient privacy will obviously be a major concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.

But it is worth trying to overcome that hurdle. Getting people to embrace digital personal health records is a Holy Grail for both the healthcare and technology industries. By making health records accessible on the Web to both patients and their doctors, better tracking of medical conditions and quicker responses to changes in those conditions could yield vast improvements in healthcare outcomes. Dangerous symptoms could be spotted earlier by doctors, while at the same time patients would have the information necessary to better take care of themselves. A shift to widespread use of online personal health records is the first step needed to change the focus of the healthcare system from one of constantly treating full-blown ailments to preventing them in the first place.

Source: TechCrunch

Google and Microsoft Look to Change Health Care

In politics, every serious candidate for the White House has a health care plan. So too in business, where the two leading candidates for Web supremacy, Google and Microsoft, are working up their plans to improve the nation’s health care.

By combining better Internet search tools, the vast resources of the Web and online personal health records, both companies are betting they can enable people to make smarter choices about their health habits and medical care.

“What’s behind this is the mass consumerization of health information,” said Dr. David J. Brailer, the former health information technology coordinator in the Bush administration, who now heads a firm that invests in health ventures.

Read the whole article on The New York Times

Access your health records from cell phones

Members of Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania will be able to check key health information from their cell phones.

Some people keep tabs on their favorite stocks using their cell phones. Soon, members of Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania will be able to check their diagnoses and other key health information in the same way: from their cell phones.

Starting at the end of March, Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania, known as BCNEPA, will begin providing 100,000 of its members--and later to all 600,000 members--secure electronic access to their own and their dependents' personal health records. The information, which includes recent diagnoses, prescribed medications, allergies, and immunization history, will be culled from the insurer's claims data as well as information that the member supplements.

Read the entire article on InformationWeek