Trend: Some major players have recently unveiled initiatives to store medical information online.
On Feb. 28, Google debuted a long-anticipated health Web site, just three days after Microsoft announced the launch of a $3 million fund to fuel development of Web programs for its four-month-old HealthVault recordkeeping service. Some excerpts from a BusinessWeek article are below.
Link: Google's Rx for Health Data
Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have unveiled what on the surface may look like competing efforts to improve how electronic health-care information is stored, shared, and disseminated. But the products would probably be more effective if they worked together.
Both are designed to help keep better track of patients' medical data. As any patient who has switched doctors or visited a specialist knows, health records are frequently stored in paper files that are neither easy to read nor transfer from one physician to the next.
But beyond sharing a larger purpose, the efforts by Google and Microsoft are different—and possibly complementary.
Google Health is an online tool that consumers can use to store personal medical records, as well as search for doctors and health information.
Microsoft's service, on the other hand, is more a platform for helping health-care providers and other professionals move information online in the first place. A care provider could use HealthVault, for example, to build a program that takes data from a blood pressure monitor and share it electronically with physicians. The system could also help users send that information to online databases such as Google's site. "HealthVault is not designed to be a place where you store all your health information," Conn says. "It is a platform and it is going to be successful if and only if lots of applications are built on top of it."
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