Microsoft HealthVault Continues to Enlarge Its Footprint

(MoneyWatch)  Nearly a year and a half after Microsoft launched its HealthVault personal health record platform, it cannot supply a list of the healthcare providers who are uploading clinical data to HealthVault, said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Health Solutions Group, in a call-in conference with healthcare bloggers. That's partly because many providers are uploading data through their software vendors, he said. He also admitted that doctors and hospitals are still sussing out whether they want to share patient data, and how they should go about doing it. But some are moving ahead. He cited New York Presbyterian Hospital, which is using Microsoft's Amalga program to find and uplink pertinent data, and he said some practices are also beginning to download information from HealthVault PHRs.

Neupert also noted that some big organizations like Cleveland Clinic and Kaiser Permanente are starting to collect data from home monitoring devices via HealthVault. For example, he said, Cleveland Clinic is having patients upload data from digital blood pressure cuffs and glucometers to HealthVault, and is then bringing the data into its electronic health record. The goal, he said, is to "find out if they can shorten the cycle time of intervention" in order to produce better patient outcomes. When I pointed out that home monitoring technology is a decade old, yet has not gotten any traction with physicians, he said that reimbursement methods have to change so that physicians will have a business case for taking the time to look at the data coming in from monitoring devices.

As for the AMA's recent announcement that it will add a link to HealthVault from the physician portal it's developing with technology vendor Covisint, Neupert said that he thinks the portal will take a while to get off the ground--perhaps two to five years--because there are still significant obstacles to physicians using such technologies as e-prescribing, even if they're free. Of course, that made me wonder how long it will be before they start looking at or adding to PHRs.

Several times in the course of the discussion, Neupert alluded to the need for policy makers to consider whether EHRs should meet the current certification criteria to help physicians and hospitals qualify for billions of dollars in government health IT incentives. This is part of the discussion about the "meaningful use" of EHRs that will be required to get those funds. An advisory committee to the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONCHIT) is supposed to release a definition of meaningful use next Tuesday (16), so this was not an academic question.

Neupert noted that Microsoft helped the Markle Foundation develop a "consensus statement" on how meaningful use should be defined. That definition proposes a more gradual evolution of technology adoption that what some software vendors have espoused. "We're trying to create a framework for certification to be focused on the outcome of the technology, not the features of the technology," he said.

What's interesting about this comment is that HealthVault is being positioned as the platform for a kind of overarching electronic health record that is not tethered to any provider or insurance company. How "meaningful use" is defined could have a big impact on HealthVault's future: if physicians can qualify for government funds by exchanging information through PHRs like HealthVault's, they might finally have a reason to use this technology.