Health care’s move online continues. Starting next month, Aetna Inc. (AET) will enable its members to move their personal health records to HealthVault, a Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Web site that handles claims, diagnoses, test results and prescriptions.
Earlier this year, Kaiser Permanente chose Microsoft to help it pilot the exchange of employees’ health care records. “This is a venture into portability,” Jan Oldenburg, practice leader in Kaiser Permanente’s health portfolio Internet services group, told xchange recently. In other words, the records will be permanent, but if a member loses Kaiser Permanente coverage, or switches, he or she retains his or her records.
All this is part of a larger movement among insurance companies and medical organizations to promote better member health by getting patients more involved through online access to their information (known in the industry as personal health records, or PHRs) and other resources.
As reported in xchange magazine’s October cover story, there are a wide variety of efforts on this front. In addition to Microsoft’s HealthVault, Google created Google Health and online health pioneer WebMD has Health Manager.
