Rush to build personal e-health records risky

By: Karen Dearne

LOCAL software developers clamouring to build personal e-health records risk creating new silos of unconnected patient information, warns Neil Jordan, Microsoft's managing director of worldwide health.

While progress on a national e-health record system has stalled, Jordan says he is slightly concerned "that everyone I've spoken to here wants to build a personal health record (PHR)".

"That's okay, but don't build them all separately or you will end up with the same problem you currently have with e-health records - they're in a whole load of silos," he says.

"There's never going to be one personal health record in a country the size of Australia, because a diabetic is going to need something quite different from someone who is obsessed with fitness and does lots of monitoring while working out."

With most personal health records now held in GPs' computers, Jordan says the person "who is ultimately funding GPs is going to benefit by putting such a platform in place".

In Australia, that is the federal Government.

In recent years, Microsoft has put a large effort into health IT, particularly consumer health IT, mainly through acquisition of successful companies and technology.

Jordan says there is "huge" interest here in Microsoft's HealthVault, a consumer health web-based platform.

"HealthVault is a free platform that helps people collect, store and share health information with family members and healthcare providers," Frost & Sullivan analyst Priyanka Gouthaman said. "It also provides a choice of third-party applications and devices for fitness, diet and health. It is a definitive step towards making online information sharing a mainstream activity."

Jordan says most of Microsoft's work in the US with HealthVault has been "trying to corral" organisations that have patient record systems and get them to open up their applications so that information can be transferred in and out.

"We're not trying to create new records; rather we're trying to provide a platform that others can utilise," he says.

HealthVault cannot be launched in Australia until it complies with local privacy laws.

Microsoft's other big effort resulted in the development of the Connected Health Framework architecture and design blueprint, which the company offers free of charge to interested government and healthcare organisations.

Microsoft is basically trying to "commoditise access" to the underlying technology used in e-health and share the learnings more broadly.

The key platform is Health Connection Engine, a service-oriented architecture configured by Microsoft's New Zealand-based partner, Simpl, as a means of integrating plug-and-play applications from other global healthcare partners.