Thursday, October 30, 2008

HealthVault, Aetna Offer New Service - WSJ.com

HealthVault, Aetna Offer New Service - WSJ.com: "In another step toward making patients' health records portable, a new partnership between Aetna Inc. and Microsoft Corp. will allow patients covered by the national insurer to transfer medical records to Microsoft's year-old health-record Web site, HealthVault. Starting next month, many enrollees in the insurer's plans will be able to move information from their Aetna 'personal health record' -- an online repository of data that includes claims, diagnoses, test results and prescriptions -- to HealthVault. Patients can pick and choose what they would like to transfer between Aetna's and Microsoft's sites.

The program will be available to people who have access to Aetna's personal health record, which the insurer has so far rolled out to some six million people. It will be available next year to many more Aetna customers. Aetna has a total of 17 million members.

A variety of technology companies, insurers and health providers are pushing to give patients the ability to access all of their health information in one place and to transfer it easily to doctors or hospitals, among others. Sites such as HealthVault and Google Inc.'s Google Health, which launched earlier this year, are trying to become central points where patients' data are available to them, for instance, when they switch from one insurer to another."

Will this be an inflection point in the way consumers manage their health on the web ?

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