HealthVault: Medically, Legally, and Politically Savvy but Technically Uninformed.

Dr. Deborah Peel has endorsed Microsoft’s HealthVault PHR. From the Patient Privacy Rights press release: PatientPrivacyRights.Org founder, Dr. Deborah C. Peel, will stand with Microsoft in Washington, D.C today at a press conference to announce the launch of HealthVault. Is Dr Peel qualified to make this recommendation? Please take a look at Dr. Deborah Peel’s […]

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HealthVault: What to do if Microsoft does nothing

Somehow I doubt that Microsoft will respond to my criticisms. This is what the Free and Open Source community needs to attempt if Microsoft refused to budge. We need to write a tool, using the Microsoft HealthVault API to export the data from HealthVault. Preferably this should export to a standard format, but comma delimited […]

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HealthVault: How to fix it

Microsoft often does the wrong thing. But that does not mean they have to. There are three requirements for behaving ethically as a PHR host. You must release all of the sourcecode to your PHR under a license that qualifies as both “Free (as-in-Freedom-not-price) Software” and Open Source. You must allow for the export of […]

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HealthVault: The Food critic never took a bite.

I hope I have made my case that “patient privacy” is complex enough that merely “Recognize that patients have the right to medical privacy” is the ethical equivalent of saying “When considering the medical ethical issue of abortion , you must recognize that often women want to get pregnant and have a child.” This is […]

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HealthVault: No Commitments and a Sleeping Watchdog.

Has Microsoft committed to keeping the promises that it has already made? No, just the opposite. Their privacy policy concludes:“We may occasionally update this privacy statement” Which means that when the commitments that Microsoft has made regarding HealthVault become inconvenient, they will simply change them. Will the data that you enter into HealthVault be secure? […]

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HealthVault: Abusing vs Implementing Standards.

Microsoft, of all the companies that might consider creating a PHR, is especially problematic. Microsoft has a long history of standards abuse. Lets consider a parallel issue to the “personal health record”, personal email. I use gmail and have used yahoo mail in the past, but for this example lets pretend that I used Hotmail, […]

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HealthVault: Failing the seven generations test

(note: This is the first of my “week of HealthVault” articles.) HealthVault, the new Personal Health Record (PHR) from Microsoft, along with Googles coming PHR offering, fail the seven generations test. I did not come up with the idea of “seven generations”, pay attention the next time you go to the grocery store and you […]

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