Perhaps there are other services a company like MS could get involved in, but I tend to think that Etienne is probably closer to something that would work when he suggests that MS will probably try to sell aggregated and anonymized health, drug/procedure and outcomes data to pharma and device companies. Which, of course, brings us back to the privacy debate .

Etienne, for what it’s worth, I’d also add that MS insists that data can be moved freely in and out of HealthVault. Whether that’s true or not is something else entirely — I’ve already chatted with one correspondent who can’t seem to upload a file to HealthVault in CCR (continuity of care record) format. For more detail, see this MS comment reported in one of the Seattle P-I’s blogs.

Mint’s goal appears to be to allow the consumer to aggreagate financial information and then provide advice, special savings or services opportunities, and simple financial analysis.

Will this work for HealthVault?

They’ve teamed up with various medical device vendors (blood sugar monitors and the like), so if you have one of these devices you can *easily* record all your data in HealthVault. That locks you into using both the vendor’s device and HealthVault – win/win. MS are also encouraging an ecosystem of applications that work with HealthVault APIs – a classic Microsoft play, and further lock in for the user.

The hapless user will be stuck with their data in HealthVault and inertia will keep them there.

Meanwhile at the back-end aggregated and anonomixed health data is worth big bucks to the drug companies. Look for some deals here when MS has enough data. That’s where the real business model is.

The latter is far more feasible. You are quite right, the business models are still uncertain. I do think that highly relevant advertising has a place in this space. What kind of returns could you get? I don’t know. However, in the end, and perhaps this will help in giving these services value in the minds of the public, the freemium model might be the best one here.

For now, I think the PHR is a bit of a toy, but I do believe that the idea has legs, BUT only in the appropriate environment. To flog a dead horse, ownership standards MUST be established first, as well as rules on advertising, etc.

That said, I’d also like to question whether there is in fact a business model here. Lots of people seem to assume that there is, but I’m not sure I see it. Selling ads next to your personal medical records seems likely to be a non-starter — something I’ve already seen others speculate about. So if that doesn’t work, where’s the revenue for the Microsofts and Googles of the world? Partnership agreements will only bring in so much, so chances are good they’ll eventually try to charge consumers for these services — which, given that the end-user value isn’t immediately apparent, seems likely to be a hard sell.

I’m totally open to being convinced otherwise, but for now this whole “personal health record” notion amounts to lots of smoke and mirrors with very little substance behind it.

Openness is key. However, I do think that there are a lot of policy issues that need to be resolved at this point. HIPAA, etc must be updated and data ownership issues need to be resolved.

There is a value and a business model here, but it will require a lot of education, pin-point execution and the collaboration of a number of parties including the consumer

It seems that the only way large scale personal health records can work is to either store the data client-side (with all the problems that brings) or store the data server-side but openly and anonymously. That way everyone gets to see all the data and nobody has any special advantage.

Commercially this is a less attractive proposition but, lets face it, thats why consumers should distrust the HealthVault type of offering anyway. The real commercial value is in the provision of a ubiquitously available health record – the vendor that provides the best on-line *service* will be the winner in this game, not the one that figures out how to sell user’s data to drug companies for the most bucks.