Microsoft’s Health Vault: Good Luck With That

Microsoft’s new HealthVault promises everyone a free place to store their medical and health records online, where presumably, they can be shared with physicians, trainers and anyone else one might care to share medical records with. Sounds great. Who wouldn’t feel more secure knowing that he could direct emergency room doctors anywhere in the world to his entire health history at any moment night or day?  Quite a few people, actually, mainly anyone who has less than total trust in Microsoft. Geezer has to admit that HealthVault sounds like a great idea. (He also has to ask why such a wonderful tool for health care is first built by a software manufacturer rather than a public health service.) Whatev. As this piece in the Washington Post reports, Microsoft didn’t beat only the federal government (not that hard to do) to this punch, it also beat Google (hard to do), which is working on its own free repository for health records. Now the only thing people have to do is persuade their doctors to use it (almost impossible to do), or at a minimum, persuade their doctors to furnish them with complete electronic versions of their medical records. Good luck with that.