Microsoft teams up with the biggest U.S. nonprofit HMO
Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit health maintenance organization has teamed up with Microsoft to expand its HealthVault online medical records program.
The partnership was announced on Monday and they will be running a pilot project which will run until November. The pilot program aims to expand functionality to the personal e-health records of Kaiser Permanente employees (who are also Kaiser Permanente patients). Kaiser will offer 156,000 of its employees the opportunity to test the new program, which will combine Kaiser’s online health records with Microsoft’s applications for monitoring weight, allergies and other medical data, the companies said today in a statement.
Microsoft is battling it out with Google for this new market. One question is the security of health records. While Microsoft and Google both adhere to federal standards for data exchange and include lots of other protection, a single database with so much private info can be an awfully tempting target for a hacker. Microsoft’s success (as well as Google’s) will come down to how much people trust the company to secure their personal info. [Source: nytimes.com & informationweek.com]
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Whats the purpose if your doctors need that information they already have that delivery service in place.There is not enough security to make me want to use such a service.