HealthVault clobbering Google in PHR race July 8, 2009

July 6th, 2009

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:06 am

It’s hard to argue with Microsoft HealthVault’s market momentum.

Every week seems to bring another release in which HealthVault is partnering with some other major industry player. Walgreens. HealthPartners. CitiusTech. The American Medical Association. Etc. Etc. Etc.

David Cerino general manager for the consumer health group at Microsoft, which includes HealthVault, credits the product’s tight integration with Microsoft’s Amalga software system, coupled with the fact this is not required, with helping HealthVault gain traction.

I really believe the way we’ve architected and built HealthVault, and the open platform, has excited a lot of partners.

It’s not only going to be consumers managing their health care on their own, but a lot of core data is sitting in source systems in hospitals, medical offices, pharmacies…a lot of people see we look at the ecosystem from the point of view of source data as well as consumers.

Translation. Google may be LeBron James but Microsoft is Dwight Howard, and you don’t pull on Superman’s cape.

The key to success in building a Personal Health Record (PHR) business, it turns out, is accessing the Electronic Health Record (EHR) data that hospitals, pharmacies, insurers and others have in their online silos. Microsoft and Cerino have done their homework.

That is now paying off, as Microsoft moves from hospitals and pharmacies to insurers, the big dogs in the health data business. “We have a partnership with Aetna that moves data into HealthVault. We’ve announced Health Partners and a couple of the Blues.”

Fort those companies, “The value proposition can’t be that if you leave we hold your data.” Not with health reform on the way. But since Microsoft has proven it’s a player in health care data, the insurers turn to it first.

Cerino compares what is happening with PHRs with what happened earlier this decade with online banking, which is the territory he covered before this.

So far, however, most of what has been happening in the PHR world is market “push,” owners of data pushing patients to take possession of it online. What seems to be lacking is market “pull,” which could come from social networks devoted to specific diseases and conditions.

” We’re always talking about it and looking at it. We look at a site like Diabetic Connect expanding and putting an application online, which we could integrate with. It could integrate healthcare devices and allow a different type of health management, and connect that to the provider.”

So Cerino not only has success and momentum, but a definite strategy. Eventually, push meets pull and HealthVault is at the center of it.

“Social networks are the consumer swell. If they demanded physicians deliver data electronically it would have happened. Then there’s the professionals’ side.  What’s the value for them? The two will start to converge.”

Microsoft is putting itself in the position to be the only answer to that question of convergence, once it is asked by enough people.