of digging through closets for records when they want information, or when they switch from one doctor to the next, he says.
Doctors sound like a tougher sell. They are already harried for time—the rules of the game dictated by health insurers—and they are notoriously slow adopters of new technology. Plus, insurers pay them for doing procedures on patients, not for reviewing blood pressure readouts that a patient sent electronically, or for doing an e-mail or telephone consult.
Then again, doctors may be motivated to change the way they spend their time and get paid. Sixty percent of a physician’s time is spent searching for or waiting for information, with only 16 percent spent on direct patient care, according to MedStar Health’s Washington Hospital Center, a figure cited by Peter Neupert, Microsoft’s vice president of the health solutions group, in testimony before Congress in January. Part of what creates all this waste and inefficiency is that specialized data is locked up in a specialist’s “silo” of different software programs they already have, Neupert said. “The right investments in health IT can tear down these silos,” he said.
Simply spending more money on IT isn’t the answer, though. It might even make the problem worse, given that the average hospital already has about 80 to 100 different record-keeping systems, which usually don’t talk well to each other, Cerino says. Getting the data to flow more freely—providing “liquidity” as Microsoft calls it—is critical. (That’s why Microsoft has developed a program it sells to hospitals called Amalga, but that’s another story.)
So far, adoption of HealthVault sounds slow. Cerino wouldn’t disclose how many people have signed up. The company is focused now on “building the ecosystem,” a spokesman said.
The business model is also a bit hazy to me, as Cerino wouldn’t disclose how much money this health platform might make for Microsoft. Microsoft made HealthVault free to consumers, because it wanted to encourage a mass audience to adopt it. If the masses join, one way to make money is to put ads on software applications and to offer those applications on the MSN Health and Fitness website, making it a “truly interactive site,” Cerino says.
Since this is all still in the early stages, it’s normal to face plenty of skepticism, Cerino says. He said he has great discussions with his own father, an orthopedic surgeon in Florida, about what it will take to get physicians on board. For Cerino’s dad, being able to efficiently share status updates on a patient with family members would make his job easier. Cerino thinks it will be even more useful for doctors who treat chronic conditions.
“Every physician will have a different type of benefit from HealthVault,” Cerino says. “They really need to see the benefit.”
