April 24 HealthVault Webinar Recap
Not only is this recap super-late, but it also does not come with the promised recording of the webinar … sorry folks, there is no good excuse here, just me being so excited to get talking that I forgot to press “go” on the recording. I’ll try to use this post to cover some of the conversation, and hope that the slides will help as well. Next time I’ll do better!
We had a great turnout --- super-happy that we’re having more regular conversations with our friends, and a quarterly cadence gives me the opportunity to go back and celebrate a little about progress we’ve made.
After making sure folks got a peek at the great pictures from the LA Senior Center, we covered three topics:
- International Expansion. As we announced a couple of weeks ago, in June we’ll be opening up HealthVault to residents of Germany. This is super-exciting, as it is the first step in a much broader expansion for the service. We’re coupling this with a streamlined business model that “goes where the value is.” Records are free for consumers; applications pay for connectivity to those records on an annual basis. I’m going to be travelling to the UK in a few weeks to do a bunch of listening … can’t wait!
- Meaningful Use Stage 2. There are a bunch of evolutionary changes to the patient engagement measures in the proposed rule: shorter timelines, making some optional items mandatory, and so on. But much more interesting for us is the fact that providers will now be assessed on patient action. This means that just having the technical capability to share data isn’t enough; providers have to get out there and do some evangelism --- woo hoo! HealthVault makes it really easy to satisfy these measures; the presentation talks about just a few of the ways to get started.
- Recent launches. This is really the fun part. I encourage you to breeze through the slides and see some of the great new apps and devices --- just a sampling I pulled out of the list. Verilogue CareCoach, the Virginia Advanced Directives Registry, Telcare’s new wireless glucose monitor … just some awesome stuff.
We also had a great Q&A session. Since I biffed the recording, we captured the text of the questions so I could repeat the answers briefly here (thanks Tory!):
We have an old integration. Please let me know who to contact to update it.
We had a lot of questions like this one, about learning more and staying in contact with us. For technical stuff, we recommend you start at https://msdn.com/healthvault and use the community forums there. We monitor them, and that way we’ll build up a solid library of answers everyone can use.
For business stuff, the email address hvbd@microsoft.com is your best bet. Melissa, Tory (and soon Raj) are at the other end of that one and can help with agreements, go lives, all that good stuff.
And for catchall purposes … the contact form on my blog at https://famliyhealthguy.com is always a fine choice. I am happy to answer when I can and find the right person when I can’t … the most important thing to me is that partners building on HV get what they need to serve their customers and end users, so I’m motivated!
Would you please describe the appliance concept in a little more detail?
During the session I talked about a technology we’re working on to help address the question of “data sovereignty” in a world where one HealthVault instance covers most of the globe. We’ve found that many, many regions are quite comfortable with the hard work we’ve done to support privacy and security for our users. But in a few cases, either politics or regulation may require that data actually reside within a particular region. To support this, we’re working on a HealthVault “appliance” that can be licensed for operation and sited as appropriate … still part of the global grid, but keeping personal health data local. We’re still in the early stages of this work, but it’s pretty interesting.
Will HV provide all the "statistics" regarding patient accessible log, counts of secure messages, etc. as required for MU2, to complement an EHR that relies upon HV for its patient engagement features?
This was a great question. To be honest, we haven’t really thought about doing this report-out so that applications can track things like how many “drop-off” packages have been picked up. We agreed to get back on this one in the near future --- but we’re committed to being the best way to support patient engagement for MU, so we’ll get it figured out!
For specific features like the patient-accessible log --- we’ve supported all of those for a long time and have already been involved in stage 1 certification for many EHRs, so all good there!
From a consumer point of view, does HV provide a guarantee that their data could be "transitioned" to a new partner if the partner is acquired and discontinues their service?
Data in HealthVault is always available for export; that’s a key tenet of the service and something that we work hard to ensure. No questions there.
Many HealthVault applications also keep data on their own servers; this is something they disclose as part of their terms of use and their data management policies. We do require that these applications provide the capability for a user to request that their information be removed, but policies about export and transition can vary by application. We don’t control that part of the ecosystem.
As always, the questions were great and the energy was high. Thanks to everyone who participated, and we’ll be back with State of the Union III in a few months!