Here for the long haul!
This is a great day for Microsoft in Health --- the future for Amalga couldn't be brighter (get it, that's a GE lightbulb joke) and I was thrilled to send the note below to our HealthVault ecosystem partners earlier today. I'm all in --- and having a great time changing the world with you all. Woo hoo!
From: Sean Nolan
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2011 4:44 PM
Subject: HealthVault Update
“Friends of HealthVault” ---
Many of you will have seen the news earlier today regarding the joint venture that Microsoft is creating with GE Healthcare. I’m personally super-excited about what this means for our enterprise Amalga business; the combination of Microsoft platform technology with GE Healthcare clinical smarts and customer relationships is going to make for a pretty powerful offering. I’ve put in a ton of time over the last year as part of the Amalga team working on our next version, and feel really good about the trajectory for that product in the joint venture. Moving forward I will focus primarily on HealthVault, and will collaborate with the Amalga team as a “consulting architect” after the establishment of the new company. Exciting times!
Anyways --- the purpose of this note is to give you an update on how the news will (or more to the point, won’t) impact Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to HealthVault.
A key part of the HealthVault value proposition is that it’s “neutral ground” for interoperability. By truly putting the patient in the center, we leapfrog a whole mess of privacy challenges and other concerns to enable a connected data ecosystem. Everybody is welcome and the playing field is level. Yes, we include HealthVault connectivity as a feature in our enterprise product suite, but those customers represent only a small fraction of the HealthVault user population. In order to flourish, HealthVault must remain an open ecosystem --- and it will, by staying at Microsoft.
Throughout the last four years, we’ve continually demonstrated our commitment to HealthVault with a steady stream of feature enhancements and new connected applications. Just last week at RSNA, we announced a great new image sharing partnership with Candelis and showed a really cool new (almost ready to go live) image viewing application for Windows Phone. We launched a secure messaging system for communicating with providers; are connecting to the new generation of wifi and cellular-enabled devices, and much, much more. As the network effects begin to take hold, we’re seeing more and more tweets like this one:
Most recently, recognizing that the ecosystem can be daunting to new users, we created our first end-to-end onramp with “emergency preparedness” --- and have been ecstatic about how the community has latched onto the idea of HealthVault serving as a hub for end-to-end “health jobs” (a term we stole from Clayton Christensen) … give it a try yourself at https://healthvault.com/eprofile and see just how clean and delightful our user experience has become.
At the end of the day --- I want to assure you that Microsoft --- and I --- remain 100% committed to the HealthVault business. I believe that together we’re creating a health system for the 21st century, and I’m proud to be sharing that journey with you. Our new venture with GE will simply add to our ability to deliver. If you have any questions or concerns, please just drop me a note, or even better join us for our inaugural HealthVault “State of the Union” webcast that I’ll be hosting in early January (follow @healthvault for more details on this in the next couple of weeks).
Thanks and take care …
---S