From an article on the New York Times
An announcement was made today on the launch of the Microsoft HealthVault. The website’s services include: a free personal health record, and a search engine designed for health queries.
The website is a portal to your personal information, locked securely in the Microsoft “Vault” equiped with encryption and high security. The information placed in there would be done primarily by doctors, and health care partners that you have given specific permission to have access.
From the article:
The organizations that have signed up for HealthVault projects with Microsoft include the American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson LifeScan, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and MedStar Health, a network of seven hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington region.
I think the idea of having a centralized health care database where professionals who are put in charge of your health can see and read everything about your medication, illnesses, allergies and more is a great idea. My biggest concern is the privacy issues with having all that information in one spot, we already have companies like Google tracking everything we do in Gmail, in searches and more. I’d hate to see how personalized my web surfing would become in the future if companies like Microsoft started displaying ads for Heart medication after probing my database.
The privacy issues aside, I think it’s long overdue to have a centralized health care database, and as long as they can keep privacy their biggest concern I think it’s a step in the right direction. I wonder how many years it will be before this type of service becomes more mainstream, as I suspect this will be slow to take off.