Microsoft HealthVault “stands ready”

Microsoft’s international business development lead has told E-Health Insider that the company “stands ready” to work with the government on personal health records.

Should the coalition want to move forward with plans to introduce PHRs, Microsoft says it would hope to support them with its HealthVault platform.

EHI TV asked whether Microsoft is disappointed by the lack of action by the coalition government in developing PHRs, as suggested in last year’s Independent Review of NHS IT commissioned by the Conservatives.

In response, Mark Johnston said: “We stand ready to help support the ambition of the leaders in the government as well as the NHS.

“We are ready to promote new sets of services, too. I do think that having the service [HealthVault] live in the country, and the ability to work in new ways with the NHS, uniquely positions us to help support the transformation that the NHS is embarking upon.”

Johnston added: “We have the ambition to extend the service broadly in the UK market place. I’d add that the NHS is very important customer to Microsoft.”

In the interview, Johnston said he he does not see Microsoft’s HealthVault platform as a replacement to the hotly debated Summary Care Record, but that it has the potential to integrate with it.

“HealthVault is very much focused on the citizen, the consumer, the patient. The SCR I would categorise as an aggregated provider view of health information. So the SCR and the data feeds into that could be selectively imported into HealthVault,” he said.

During the interview Johnston appeared to contradict Microsoft colleagues, who in June told EHI that advertising would form part of the model. 

In a June interview on the launch of the service, Microsoft indicated that revenues would be generated through a combination of advertising and co-development fees charged to partners.

Johnston said: “I think there’s a lot of misconception around the advertising. Our intent is not to commercialise on advertising via HealthVault. We are not doing trying to do that in any country and it is not in our plans.

“Our business model is more related to those different orgainsations that want to introduce new, innovative services. There’s a value proposition for an organisation like Nuffield or a primary care trust that is looking to us for a better way of care coordination.”

View the full interview on EHI TV.