Empowering the Patient - Health Informatics in the Cloud - page 70

web-based PHRs gained enormous attention in October, 2007 when Microsoft
launched HealthVault. [ 12 ] Google followed them in 2008 but withdrew from the
market in 2011.
In early 2007 Aetna launched a pilot PHR based on the extensive claims data
they already had for the employees of their clients. This is a very appealing concept
since it removes from the patient much of the burden of correctly entering their own
health data. On the other hand, as with all claims data, the amount of clinical detail
is less than ideal. It can be known, for example, that a test was done but the results
will not be in a claim. The company later introduced SmartSource SM technology that
personalized health searches based on the information in a person's PHR. [ 13 ]
In 2006, America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the Blue Cross and Blue
Shield Association (BCBSA) worked together to identify the core information to
include in PHRs, and also developed and pilot tested draft standards to enable consum-
ers to transfer PHR data when they change coverage. [ 14 ] This eventually led to the
development of an HL7 Plan-to-Plan standard that was published in May, 2011. [ 15 ]
HealthVault was funded and incubated within Microsoft starting in 2005 by Peter
Neupert and Sean Nolan who met when they were both at drugstore.com during the
great Internet boom of the 1990s. Both had family situations that caused them to be
interested in healthcare so they decided to do a health startup. Peter talked to current
Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, while the two of them were jogging, and they became
convinced that doing something significant in a slow moving industry like healthcare
required a large corporate umbrella. They also felt that the new business could benefit
by leveraging Microsoft's technology relationship with virtually every hospital.
I interviewed Sean, now a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, and he says he
learned over the ensuing years that interoperability and innovation in healthcare
were harder and took longer than he had expected. Today, based on the many factors
we've been discussing, he feels they are finally in the right place at the right time,
something he expressed by saying that “patients as a hub of information sharing are
going to be a key part of our healthcare system”.
So far HealthVault has been most successfully introduced to people when they
are having a life event such as a baby, getting a new medical diagnosis, having a
medical emergency or having a parent getting older and needing help. At that point
a key advisor such as a physician can best introduce people to PHR technology.
HealthVault agrees with others that employers also make sense as a point to intro-
duce PHRs, but has not focused on them yet.
Sean believes that over the next two years there will be sufficient saturation of
interoperability that the market will start to take off. HealthVault has very success-
fully implemented an app platform and, today, they have 300 of them along with 80
medical devices that utilize it. Sean emphasized that their API is platform agnostic
(it even works with iPhones). Through the API a developer could ask the HealthVault
for “all this patient's blood pressures” or “all those over systolic over 120”. Consent
for use of their data, along with all other stored information, is entirely managed by
the patient.