San Francisco — Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente, the largest non-profit health care management organization in the United States, is endorsing the drive towards a pilot program that would exchange health information between the insurer’s My Health Manager service and the HealthVault personal health records service.
The joint venture announced Monday between the two companies, anticipates pushing forward the efforts to digitize medical records and safely transfer sensitive health data.
The companies will start with a pilot program available to Kaiser’s 156,000 employees, which will run until November. If the test is successful, the program will be expanded to Kaiser’s 8.7 million members, including the 3.3 million who reside in Northern California.
“This is a giant step for us, and our first joint venture with a consumer health record supplier,” said Anna-Lisa Silvestre, Kaiser’s vice president for online services.
The partnership comes in the midst of a drive to give people greater control of and access to their medical records. The shift by technology companies including Google and Microsoft to bring personal health records (PHRs) online takes advantage of the change from paper-based medical records to electronic health records (EHRs) by hospitals, doctors’ offices and insurers backed by the federal government.
“This deal is reasonably important although not at all surprising. Kaiser is only the first of many insurers to come,” said Carlton Doty, an analyst at Forrester Research.
There are numerous organizations providing personal health data online, but the two new entrants are Microsoft, which come into the field last October, and Google, which came in last month.
These two major technology companies contribute their potential to hasten the adoption of electronic health records, which are seen as an important tool in improving the quality of medical care and containing costs. And the Microsoft and Google health offerings give individuals control of their own health records, as well as responsibility for them.
Kaiser, based in Oakland, manages one of the most extensive health-care systems in the country. Other than providing health insurance, it counts more than 13,000 physicians in its Permanente Medical Groups. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals include more than 30 medical centers and more than 415 medical offices.
Kaiser members are already capable of scheduling appointments, e-mail their doctor, refill prescriptions and access test results online through the HMO’s health record, called My Health Manager, which is used by more than 2 million people, or nearly a quarter of Kaiser’s 8.7 million members.
The pilot program would enable users to amalgamate their Kaiser information with data stored on the HealthVault platform, such as results from glucose-monitoring devices, blood-pressure monitors and other information such as diet and exercise not currently stored in Kaiser’s personal online records.
“One of the most essential things to test in the short term is the capability of the data exchange. Does data go from one place to another securely and reliably?” said Kaiser’s Silvestre.
Launched by Microsoft in October, HealthVault is considered to give people a place to store their entire health information, from prescriptions to X-rays and lab reports. While insurers such as Kaiser, Aetna and WellPoint offer their members access to online databases, HealthVault provides people a way to pull that data together on an independent site.
“Without an independent third party, health records are not portable; they are not owned by the consumers,” Doty said.
The availability of centralized medical records to the cloud would make up a part of Kaiser’s My Health Manager service, which also gives patients new ways to communicate with their doctors and find general health information. The records could also help the health-care industry cut costs and improve care.