Health Vault: Do You Trust Microsoft With Your Health Data?
Microsoft has created a new online service for you. It’s a portal called Health Vault where you can keep track of all your health information online. It’s free and you are supposed to be able to give your doctors permission to upload your data there. Sheldon Comics eloquently put into words my gut reaction to it:
Sheldon Comics by Dave Kellett (10-10-07): Click to see full comic
The worst thing about this situation is that Microsoft is our BEST option here. Our healthcare system is in such shambles that a website like this is the best we have to keep track of everything. Where other countries like Germany require doctors to give you all their information on your personal microchip, we are trying to drag our doctors into the twentieth century (much less the twenty-first).
According to the Washington Post, doctors are a bit shy of technology:
About 90 percent of physicians and more than 80 percent of hospitals still use paper records, according to Nancy Szemraj, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Good luck getting your doctor to upload his manila file into Health Vault for you. If you actually trust Microsoft enough to use Health Vault, it’s YOU who will be doing all the work of inputting your data.
Sorry, Microsoft. Software can’t solve this problem. Our entire system is broken and half of us can’t even afford it. Canada looks better and better all the time.
Update 10-11-07: Sheldon did it again and said EXACTLY what I was thinking!
More thoughts on the User Agreement for Health Vault here: