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Microsoft Working On Health Information 'Vault' System
josmar52789 wrote with an article from the New York Times, discussing Microsoft's new push into the consumer health care market. The plan is to offer personal health care records online via a system called HealthVault. Numerous big names in the medical field have signed up for the service, including the 'American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson LifeScan, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and MedStar Health'. The ultimate purpose of the service is to provide an online accessible but highly secure service to patients and medical facilities: "The personal information, Microsoft said, will be stored in a secure, encrypted database. Its privacy controls are set entirely by the individual, including what information goes in and who gets to see it. The HealthVault searches are conducted anonymously and will not be linked to any personal information in a HealthVault personal health record. Microsoft does not expect most individuals to type in much of their own health information into the Web-based record. Instead, the company hopes that individuals will give doctors, clinics and hospitals permission to directly send into their HealthVault record information like medicines prescribed or, say, test results showing blood pressure and cholesterol levels. "
This sounds like a horrible idea to me from other standpoints too:
1) Medical professionals never like patients to have full access to their records, as if a patient misunderstands something on their file, their life could be at stake based on the decisions they make.
2) The US has this thing called the PATRIOT act, and MS has agreements with some agencies allowing back-door access to data they host. Let's just say that I highly doubt this information will be protected from people working for US "security" agencies.
3) The system appears to be designed so that MS can sell aggregated data to drug companies and insurance companies. Seems to me though that even with aggregated data, you could reverse-mine it to have a reasonable suspicion regarding individuals (you'd know trends, which would help in searching for more specific details)
Anyway, the whole thing could be really useful if used correctly, but there are so many ways it could be misused even if the system doesn't have a major security breach that I for one would never use it.
Like it or not, your medical information is going to become electronic. Microsoft isn't the first company to propose an Electronic Health Record -- not by far. The Cerner Corporation, for example, has been working modernize the health record since 1980. There are at least two universities in the U.S. which host a major in Medical Informatics, a program specifically designed to produce experts in this very subject.
Try to fight the Electronic Health Record is like trying to fight the use of computers in any other field -- it's inevitable.
"I'll be damned if any of my personal medical information will be entrusted to anything using M$ junk."
It already is. Look around your doctor's office next time you are there. See the computers? They aren't Macs now, are they?
"But this one goes to 11!"