More on HealthVault: Profiling the Platform

Posted by Lygeia Ricciardi October 9, 2007

Thanks for your comments. While it seems that some users have run in to frustrations with the front-end features of HealthVault, what’s interesting about it from our perspective is Microsoft’s launch of a platform on which numerous PHRs and other applications can run. In other words, HealthVault is creating the “back end,” while Microsoft’s 40-plus partners and potential future partners are responsible for developing “front end” options that users can choose among. HealthVault (or any similar platform that may emerge) is laying the infrastructure to support a whole host of new products and services all using the same data created by you and your health care providers. For more on this, see Vince Kuraitis’ blog post.

Creating infrastructure tools is major undertaking, invisible to most users. In doing so with an open approach, HealthVault is making available to “front end” tool builders a stable, interoperable data source. This separation of the application from the information driving it makes the “front end” tool builder's job both easier and more sustainable—and more likely to result in applications that take us closer to the promised view of a suite of personalized interoperable health information tools. It frees patients or consumers to transfer their data from one application to another: that means you can take your PHR with you if you switch employers or health plans, or integrate your data from a glucose monitor (and other devices) into a PHR that helps you analyze it.

Early comments on this and other blogs may indicate that the front end utilities of HealthVault may not entirely hit the mark.  I have not had the chance to test drive most of the applications that “launched” with HealthVault last week. Some are bound to be more useful than others—but that judgment will vary based on the individual. Over the coming months and years I expect many more (and more sophisticated) tools that build on the HealthVault platform to become available. The value of the system as a whole will need to be judged over time.

What this development does, though, is to challenge the community of PHR visionaries to rethink the power and potential of personal health records—and to use platforms like this to create tools that can truly serve people as they engage in their health and health care.