MS HealthVault: Good Idea, Disappointing Experience

Gone are the days of housecalls, Marcus Welby, M.D., and a doctor or insurance firm you can trust to keep lifelong records. Keeping good medical records is yet one more thing we've had to take under our own control. If you're willing to take a leap of faith by trusting Microsoft and its partners with your personal information then HealthVault can be a tremendous assistant.

HealthVault lets you create a personal repository for all of your (and your family's) medical information. It's also a portal to research medical issues in much the same way that WebMD and other medical information sites allow for searches. And HealthVault interfaces with a variety of 3rd party partners to allow you to do things like automatically upload results of in home tests like blood sugar or exchange information with your doctors or insurance companies.

On paper, HealthVault sounded great. The opening screen makes a point of telling you that only you can choose whether or not you're going to share the information. A longtime worry of privacy experts, Microsoft says it will not target advertising based on mining your personal information either.

As the CMO (Chief Medical Officer) for a family of five (and pets) I was really excited to take HealthVault for a test drive. I was quite disappointed, though. I thought surely Microsoft would give you some simple tools for the input of medical records and information. You know: Name of Doctor, Date of Visit, Diagnosis, Immunizations, Insurance, etc.

But they don't. It took me about thirty minutes of poking around before the notion that HealthVault is really just an empty vault sunk in. The only way to add medical information is to choose to work with one of its partners. The hope is that hospitals, doctors and insurance companies will all be able to access and share your repository of information and start talking to each other. (As my grandmother used to say: From your mouth to gods ears.) While Microsoft deserves points for being ambitious, I'm not holding my breath.

I'm already a bit squeamish about trusting Microsoft with my medical information. Why would I let some unproven partner in on the act just because Microsoft said it's ok? When I logged on Microsoft's partners included The American Heart Association, CapMed  and Kryptic—two companies that offer interoperable recordkeeping solutions for the medical community, lifestyle/fitness partners to help you log things like exercise and diet and a few others. When you click to accept one of the partners like I did for CapMed I was whisked off to the CapMed site where I had to poke around for any connection to the Health Vault. (I gave up.)

I would have much preferred it if Microsoft made a simple recordkeeping tools available so I could keep all info in one place and then decide if I wanted to team up with their partners. Or market this product to the medical institutions who obviously need to talk to each other using a common record format more than I do. But don't waste my time telling me I can be in control of my medical life when it's clear that's just not happening anytime soon.

It's a complicated problem to solve and kudos for Microsoft for building a nice start, but I'll wait for Act II on this one.