LiveSide - News blog : health.live.com

Microsoft announces HealthVault: Search, Store, Connect health information

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:39:00 GMT

Some changes to https://health.live.com caught our eye last night, and today Microsoft announces HealthVault. The new set of services, which you can access from health.live.com, provides a secure place to search, and also to collect and store health information which can then be shared with doctors, hospitals, etc.

Microsoft is making a major push in health search and health care information. Interestingly, it is also promoting search privacy heavily in this announcement:

Created in cooperation with leading privacy advocates, respected security experts and dozens of the world’s leading healthcare organizations, HealthVault is designed and built to enhance privacy while providing people with the control they expect and require.

“Microsoft is the first major technology company to engage with the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy in a serious way. The privacy protections built into HealthVault reflect the privacy principles of the Coalition. HealthVault prohibits onward transfer of data without explicit informed consent; its contractual obligations with advertisers require protection of any data transferred from the platform; its privacy policy is simple and easy to understand,” said Dr. Deborah Peel, founder of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation. “That means consumers finally have a trusted place to store their personal health information that will not be data-mined, because they alone control it. Microsoft’s use of strong privacy principles including the principles of the Coalition, its ongoing relationship with consumer advocates, and its commitment to independent third-party audits set a new standard for privacy protections in health information technology.”

Providing secure, private search and data storage for health information is a noble effort, but this announcement also seems to be taking a shot at a certain data-mining intensive search provider. Looks like battle lines are being drawn.

HealthVault appears when you visit https://health.live.com, in the form of the Scrapbook, where you can store search information,

or by going to www.healthvault.com, where all three components of HealthVault are laid out - Search - Account - and Connection Center:

A quick explanation of the service can be found in the FAQ:

What is Microsoft HealthVault?

HealthVault is a free online service that allows you to gather, manage, and benefit from health and fitness information for you and your family. Created in cooperation with leading privacy advocates, respected security experts, and dozens of the world’s leading healthcare organizations, HealthVault was built on the principle that you should control your own health records and have access to online health management tools that you trust.

You can store health information for many people (such as your family and even your pets) in one HealthVault account. Each person’s information is stored and accessed separately.

You can choose to share specific information (or all information) with:

other people (such as your doctor or personal trainer, for example)

programs that use the raw data you store in HealthVault to provide information to you about managing your health

HealthVault Search stores your scrapbooks in HealthVault.

The Connection Center is a secure way to connect health monitor devices, for example, to the health vault:

..right now a pretty small list but this will grow. What this means is that HealthVault will offer an easy way to take your own blood pressure, for example, and securely transmit it to doctors or others that you trust and allow.

HealthVault seems to be a well thought out, secure and private, and simple set of services for managing health information, one that may prove invaluable once it gains acceptance throughout the health community.

Health Instant Answers: update and clarification

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:58:00 GMT

While posting on the new Health vertical for Live Search, I wasn't able to show how to get to these answers from just the main Live Search page, and that's because the Instant Answers functionality is just now starting to roll out. I asked John Henson, a Product Manager for the Health Solutions Group about it:

Just as with entertainment and commerce searches, queries that are identified as health-related will show up as “instant answers” at the top of mainline search requests. We are testing a few variations of this answer; you can see the primary one here:

We just started running these answers yesterday for a very small percentage of traffic --- which is why you haven’t seen them yet. Over the next few weeks they will be ramping up to full coverage.

Thanks for checking out the new search --- we’re excited about it! Don’t hesitate to let me know if I can answer any other questions.

As you can see, much of the information that is shown on the https://health.live.com site is shown right on the main page as an Instant Answer, making the information much more easily available.

Live Search Health: a Med Story

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:27:00 GMT

One of the four "verticals" of the new Live Search 2.0 is Health, available at https://health.live.com. Actually the first of the new features of the service is just that, an encrypted entry into search about health information, using the https: secure sockets layer. Microsoft did a lot of testing to find out what users were looking for in health information, and security and privacy were high on the list.

Much of the new look and performance of health.live.com comes about as a result of the Microsoft acquisition of MedStory. Microsoft bought the privately held company last February, gaining a foothold in a potentially lucrative health search and health information market. According to MSNBC News:

Overall, health-care costs are expected to make up about 20 percent of U.S. gross domestic product by the year 2015. The number of people seeking health care information on the Internet should expand substantially as aging baby boomers develop ailments associated with the senior years. Also seniors are among the fastest growing segment on the Internet.

And the acquisition press release offers further incentive to offer a better health search product:

According to an October 2006 study* by the Pew Internet & American Life Project,
8 million people in the United States go online for health information every day, and 53 percent of health-seekers said a recent search had an impact on how they take care of themselves or someone else. Yet 22 percent of respondents said they felt frustrated by a lack of information or an inability to find what they were looking for.

So there's good reason to improve search for health related information. Health.live.com, for a first release, provides an interesting and useful approach. Getting started, from Live.com, there is currently only a link to health.live.com from the drop down "more" box, although it remains to be seen where all these "beta" tabs end up:

A current search from the Live.com page does not offer a link to the health results, but that too may change soon (afraid I don't have it in my notes):

Once the Health search is initiated (either through the Health (beta) tab or from navigating to https://health.live.com, for now), the MedStory influence becomes apparent. Here's the page in Live Search:

and the same search at MedStory:

A closer look at the top portions of these pages shows that the information shown on health.live.com is coming directly from MedStory - the bar graphs in MedStory have been changed to lighter and darker boxes, but the information is the same. Health.live.com provides more information in a well laid out page, though, augmenting the web results with Article Results, and Sponsored Results. According to those I talked to at Searchification, those "Sponsored Results" may or may not be paid ads - we were shown one set of results linking to a government survey. Quite a bit of information is provided in the Article Results, offering "Instant Answer" type results without having to navigate away from the search page, the results here linking to the US National Institutes of Health's Medline Plus:

The overall effort here is to provide lots of information within a single page, leveraging information from MedStory and other sources. Links to more information are well laid out and visually attractive, and in general the experience seems better than just searching on a main search page. Expect lots more emphasis on these "verticals", as Live Search seeks to differentiate itself, and increase market share.