Aetna has become Microsoft’s latest partner for HealthVault. The two companies announced today that the six million Aetna members that already have access to the insurer’s own online records-keeping service can now also use and port information into Microsoft’s HealthVault. HealthVault is a cloud service from Microsoft that stores healthcare records and allows these records to be shared with healthcare providers, hospitals, insurance companies, with whomever the user wants to share them. It also supports the import and data synch from numerous health devices such as blood pressure monitors, diabetes test kits and heart rate monitors.
The benefit for Aetna members in using HealthVault instead of (or in addition to) Aetna’s online Personal Health Record (PHR), is that users will retain their records even if they dump Aetna. Of course, Aetna notes that there are other reasons that it made this agreement with Microsoft. The insurance company says that users of HeathVault can now share their health records with any physician that has access to HealthVault, even if that physician is outside the Aetna family. Plus they can use the devices the HealthVault supports. Records can not only be ported from PHR into HealthVault but can be ported from HealthVault to PHR. This does look like a winning option for Aetna’s users, with the exception that their records now have a second place where they can be hacked. (However, Microsoft says it takes security of HealthVault very seriously). It is hard resist a snarky comment about trusting Microsoft’s security but we have no evidence that this service is any less secure than competing options, be it from a health insurer or from Google.
Aetna says it covers some 37.2 million people with healthcare services, but only six million are eligible for its PHR program.
Aetna is another fancy feather in Microsoft’s HealthVault cap. Over the summer Microsoft scored partnerships with AT&T and Covisint and a pilot with Kaiser. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that the American Heart Association is now using HealthVault to power a revised version of its online health information site, too. The new site is called Heart360. Users set up a HealthVault account and then through the site, they can store records of their blood pressure and other statistics.
Microsoft has repeatedly said that one of the keys to its search strategy is to cultivate new markets and new forms of search such as healthcare. A simple search box is available on HealthVault Web pages. The box is a gateway to Live Search which searches the Web, and not some king of Dogpile collection of health databases, even though the box hints that its has special access to these by sporting a label that says “Web health results.” Microsoft hopes that as consumers use HealthVault, if they have health questions they will type those questions into its search box.
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