Microsoft has launched a website to help people aggregate all their health related information in one place.

Called HealthVault, this website (currently in beta) aims to collect medical records including medical history, diagnostic tests, X-ray, CT scans and prescription drugs in one place. In addition the website also allows you to connect your blood sugar and blood pressure monitoring equipment to your PC and upload the results to HealthVault for review by your doctor.

HealthVault also integrates a health search engine. However, the results it displays are not any better than Google or Yahoo. One nice feature is that they have embeded a webpage either from Wikipedia, Medline or Mayo Clinic, detailing the health related query so that the user does not have to click an additional link (unfortunately the search page does not display correctly on Safari for Mac!!!!!).

Another hit or miss feature (and potentially dangerous) is the categorization of search results into:

1. Personal health
2. Conditions
3. Procedures
4. Drugs & Substances

As an example a search for “Aortic Stenosis” results in “”ejection fraction“ in the procedure section.

Oh! And for the first look into the website - registering for HealthVault requires you to create a strong password. And not any strong password - ones that are cryptic and difficult to remember for normal people. If you use combinations of your name with birth date (or for some other name & number combination) you cannot even register into HealthVault. And Microsoft does not even provide password suggestions.

And that is where my quest to review HealthVault ended. I tried all possible combinations of words and numbers that I could remember but none worked.

All I can imagine now is someone turning up at the hospital without the password to HealthVault which he has stored safely in his HomeVault.

Other Blogs on HealthVault: MedGadget, Wall Street Journal Health Blog, Download Squad

Technorati Tags: First Look, HealthVault, Medical Records, Microsoft, Review, Search

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Health News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.