Do You Trust Microsoft?
by Matthew ~ October 9th, 2007. Filed under: HL7 News, HL7 Tools.The goal of HL7 is to make the exchange of healthcare information more accurate and more efficient. This goal is becoming more realistic with new projects that are consolidating and opening access to medical professionals online. However, this is making people a bit squeamish about sharing such personal data. To many, their medical information should be more protected than their financial data. The irony is that so many people have been working towards this goal for years and now that a real solution is approaching, the public may not want it. Medical professionals certainly want and need access to this information but is that a compelling enough argument?
The current paradigm is entirely opt-in, but this will soon change as all healthcare data is exchanged over the internet. Will patients be able to opt-out in the future? This will give privacy advocates enough to write about for years to come. The latest company to jump in is Microsoft. They are offering online medical record management though their new project, HealthVault. If you haven’t had a chance to see their latest effort in healthcare, it may be worth a look. It will take some time for this new approach to managing personal healthcare data to catch on.
I’m guessing they are using BizTalk architecture with an HL7 adapter. Does anyone know? This would be an excellent opportunity to show what their architecture can do for Healthcare IT.
For more information take a look at: the MSDN HealthVault Forums and the HealthVault blog.
January 24th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Hi Matthew,
First - I am not an expert in HealthVault and the following are my comments and personal views and not those of my employer..blahblahblah…nuff said
Interestingly enough there is no HL7/BizTalk involved in the implementation of HealthVault. There is a very interesting data model though. There are many ways that HealthVault can accept data from many sources and BizTalk could be one of those aspects (though it is not at present the case). I have not as yet investigated that aspect of it myself - but plan to interview the development team at HIMSS in Orlando this year and publish the result on my blog (sorry about the gratuitous personal plug).
HealthVault is what you could call a ‘platform’ for partner development, storage and management of Health Record content. It can absorb content from various sources and extrapolate raw content into graphs and sequences that a DSS may be able to use. Loosely speaking, the design behind HealthVault follows on from Microsoft’s vision for healthcare – which we call ‘Knowledge Driven Health’ (KDH). Implementations of Knowledge Driven Health take the architectural form of the Connected Health Framework (CHF). The CHF takes its physical form in the implementation of solutions via the Connected Health Platform (CHP). HealthVault is built on a cross section of products that constitute part of the Connected Health Platform. (I thought I would play acronym bingo for a while…sorry)
While I do not claim to be an expert in HealthVault – I do have an avid (some would say rabid) interest in it as a specific measure of where the commoditisation of HIT is heading.
For more accurate information I should point you to the blog of a colleague of mine – Roberto Ruggeri - http://blogs.msdn.com/rruggeri/archive/2007/11/04/designing-healthvault-s-data-model.aspx
Regards,
Van
PS: Cool blog – I am using you and others to drive themes in mine.