October 09, 2007
Personal Health Records and Disparities
Microsoft made some news last week with the announcement of their HealthVault system.
From Medpagetoday.com:
Information such as blood pressure or weight loss can be uploaded and -- once online -- can be shared with doctors or any other recipients a user chooses, the company said.
The goal is to reduce "unnecessary confusion, paperwork and delays," Microsoft said.
"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," Microsoft said in a statement.
Microsoft is not alone in the push towards Personal Health Records (PHRs.)
From NYTimes.com:
[Google] has been developing offerings broadly similar to Microsoft’s — personal health records stored in Google data centers, and enhanced health search.
Google will not discuss the timing of its health plans. Marissa Mayer, the Google vice president now overseeing the health team, said, “We hope the products we’re working on will give people access to better information about health that is more relevant to them and help them manage and control their own information.”
At Cisco, the head of its health care practice, Dr. Jeffrey Rideout, recently left to join a private equity firm, Ziegler HealthVest Management. (Cisco called his departure a “leave of absence.”) And Dossia, a coalition led by Intel to provide employees at several large companies with personal health records, is going more slowly than planned.
The security of the data seems to be one of the major concerns.
From the PointClear Blog:
Microsoft may do a great job securing the HealthVault platform, but what about all the third-party vendors and partners who write applications that use HealthVault? If health information sloshes back and forth between these third parties, and some of the third parties have insufficient security which can potentially lead to data breaches, then how secure is HealthVault in practice?
Aside from the security issues, there may be access issues for underserved populations.
A policy brief from Mathematica Policy Reasearch, Inc (pdf) reviewed 21 software-based PHRs and found that only 2 products were available in Spanish as well as English and all but 2 of the reviewed software packages charges a fee for the PHR. While this fee can be avoided in free web based offerrings such as the those by Microsoft and Google, an individual still needs secure access to a computer.
For insightful discussion read this post at the Health Care Blog.