RSSHow will Microsoft's initiatives impact health care?
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published March 7, 2008, 3:34 PM
At a big medical conference last week, Microsoft dove deeper into an maelstrom of industry health care solutions aimed at meeting the demands of government regulators, hospitals, insurance firms, and consumers. Can the team from Redmond swim the distance against competitors including IBM and Google?
The challenge before database software providers today is to address the critical and lucrative market of healthcare information access for doctors and patients, in a way that fulfills the mandates of government regulations for accountability, and at the same time fulfills the requirements of government regulations for security...while staying viable for the everyday user.
Microsoft is positioning itself to meet this challenge. Although it was Google CEO Eric Schmidt who delivered the keynote at this year's edition of Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer got the same honor last year.
Last October, following up on Ballmer's HIMSS address that year, Microsoft launched HealthVault -- a consumer software and services platform intended to give consumers better control over their health care records -- together with HealthVault Search.
During this year's HIMSS, Microsoft augmented the consumer-oriented HealthVault with Amalga, a new family of enterprise health care software covering clinical, operational, and financial applications.
Steve Aylward, general manager for Microsoft's US Health and Life Sciences Group, focused on "familiarity" as one of Microsoft's key strengths in tackling the health care market, in a recent Q&A session.
"The familiarity of Microsoft technology can really help healthcare organizations and governments -- the largest healthcare providers in the world -- to increase their efficiency and accuracy, and thereby reduce errors in utilizing their existing technologies," Aylward contended during the Q&A, which was provided by Microsoft to journalists last week.
It would be clear to almost anyone that this "familiarity" stems from Microsoft's already huge entrenched base in the office applications field. Other vendors working in the area of electronic health records have included IBM, Verizon, WebMD, and AOL founder Steve Case's Revolution Health.
But unlike IBM, which has been concentrating more of its efforts of late toward back office software, or Google, whose platform is much more consumer-oriented, Microsoft's products are already well established in nearly every market segment, from home PC users to large enterprises.
Like Google Health, Microsoft's HealthVault can be considered a "cloud" platform in which patient's health records are being moved off of paper and onto storage networks, including leased storage space through the Internet.
But especially with the addition of Amalga, Microsoft also seems to be doing a particularly comprenehsive job of honing in the consumer privacy concerns first dealt with under the HIPAA law and now re-emerging in proposed new legislation now before Congress.
Despite the passage of HIPAA a dozen years ago or so, health care remains a very hot topic in Washington, DC these days.
In a BetaNews search of pending legislation before Congress, we turned up over 1,000 legislation packages containing "health care" as an exact phrase. Although some of this legislation is attempting to establish a uniform and government-subsidized national health care system, a total of nine legislative bills contain the exact phrase "electronic health record."
For instance, H.R. 5442, the TRUST in Health Information Act of 2008, introduced last month by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D - Mass.), is a bill which promises to "provide individuals with access to health information of which they are a subject [and] to ensure personal privacy, security, and confidentiality with respect to health related information in promoting the development of a nationwide interoperable health information infrastructure," among other things.
Next: Convincing the user that he's in control of his medical data...
March 10, 2008
Dear Ms. Emigh:
I read with great interest your March 7 article on electronic personal health records and thought you would find MyMedicalRecords of interest because we've overcome some of the concerns expressed about privacy, user-friendly technology, etc. MMR has contracts with organizations covering more than 30 million lives to provide our services.
Contrasting MMR to other popular EMR products, MMR is delivering the most user-friendly, convenient and versatile web-based Personal Health Record available today. Using our proprietary patent pending technologies, complete patient information including actual lab test results, radiology reports and images, progress notes and all of a patient’s charts can be uploaded or faxed with annotated voice notes and comments directly into the user’s password-secured account. Users do not need to install any special software or use any special hardware to use our service.
MMR also has integrated other advanced features, such as multilingual translation, a drug interaction database of more than 20,000 medications, calendaring for prescription refills and doctor appointments, and private voicemail for a doctor’s message and other personal uses.
There also is a special “Emergency Log-In” feature that allows a doctor to access a user’s account to view their most important medical information in the event of a medical emergency. To ensure individual privacy, specific data, such as prescriptions, allergies, blood type and copies of actual medical files or images, are pre-selected by the user for inclusion in the online read-only Emergency Folder.
In addition, MMR also includes an online ESafeDeposit Box feature that enables users to securely store any important document in a virtual “lock box” and access them anytime from anywhere using an Internet-connected computer or PDA. These documents can include Advanced Directives, Wills, insurance policies, birth certificates, photos of Family, Pets and Property, and more. MMR is clearly one of the most complete user-friendly Personal Health Records available today (I can provide details).
Incidentally, MMR has built a two-way data interface to Google Health and our understanding with Google is that MMR will be part of their public launch expected shortly. This will enable users to move information from their Google Health account to their MyMedicalRecords account and vice versa. This will enhance the Google Health user experience by allowing the individual to store documents, images, and other personal information in MMR’s easy-to-use personal health record and will have the benefit of all the additional features MMR has that are not available directly within Google Health.
I would encourage you to visit MMR and set up a complimentary account. Simply go to www.mymedicalrecords.com and sign up using registration code MMRBLOG. I would be interested in your experience and hope that you will include us in any further discussions of Personal Health Records. I could also send you more information by email or snail mail (the latter allows me to send a bit more than I’d want to clog your email with). Recently, we sent out a release about MMR Pro, which will better enable physicians to put patient records into secure, online accounts.
Sincerely,
Scott S. Smith
Director of Public Relations
MyMedicalRecords.com
11000 Santa Monica Blvd. #430
Los Angeles CA 90067
888/808-4667
Ext 123 (Cell: 310/254-4051)
ssmith@mmrmail.com
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|Mailto link under the headline, genius.
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|Well, one possible answer to the question posed by the title could be an increase in cardiac arrests from reading the licensing costs for the Microsoft products that are required to make it all work.
All joking (sort of) aside, anything that can be done to cut down how many f-ing times I have to re-write all my stupid personal and medical info on a bazillion forms is welcome news to me. I've had to re-enter the same info on multiple forms in the same office more times than I can recall. It's just dumb.
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|as I sit here pouring over a stck a foot high (11 3/4 in high to be exact) of bills from doctors and hospitials. With insuranc! After 5 months of getting cancer,I have to argue overbieng doubled billd tripple billed!!! Something needs to be done!
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|I just hope the Blue Screen of Death will not be literal for someone.
Tim S
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|According to some secret medical documents, the Microsoft OS Windows XP was the leading source for infesting Schizophrenia in human beings.
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