Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Google Health versus Microsoft HealthVault

Google Health versus Microsoft HealthVault : "The big competition here is between Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault. (Revolution Health is more of an information portal at this point, and who is going to trust their health insurance company?). Whereas HealthVault’s strengths seem to lie in tying together different health information silos on the back end, Google Health is focusing more initially on the consumer side. It is trying to do an end-run around the health establishment by trying to get consumers to manually load their own medical information into their profiles. HealthVault allows this as well, but seems to have stronger partnerships with back-end health data providers. Google will no doubt tackle the existing health data silos as it proceeds. It really has no choice if it wants to organize the world’s health information."

I know many people are going to treat this as a competition, but I think this is very short-sighted. Both these efforts are going to provide consumers with more control over their medical treatment, and this paradigm shift is what is important . Whether they do it by using Microsoft's services or Google's is unimportant in the big picture. The true winners are going to be patients - and those doctors who accept the fact that empowered patients are the best patients !

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