Microsoft is highlighting the importance of “community” in healthcare.
Unveiled at the recent HIMSS10 Conference and Exhibition in Atlanta, HealthVault Community Connect is the tech giant’s latest healthcare portal project, designed to link the hospital to a patient and his or her referring doctors through an e-health record account. The portal allows patients to register for hospital admissions and procedures, then have the hospital enter discharge instructions, clinical notes, medications, test results and other data onto the patient’s HealthVault account for sharing with physicians, family members or others in the continuum of care.
“This closes the loop between patient, physician and hospital,” said David Cerino, general manager of Microsoft’s health solutions group. “In the past, the difficulty has always been when you start interacting with the different parts of the healthcare system. This provides the missing link.”
According to Lynne Dunbrack, an analyst with Health Industry Insights, HealthVault Community Connect fills an important void in healthcare finance by linking important sources of data. Aside from sharing clinical data, she said, the portal allows physicians, hospitals and health plans to communicate directly with the patient and each other, smoothing out the process and allowing each to make their billing practices more transparent.
“It really extends out into the community and helps to start connecting these silos of information,” she said.
Dunbrack said many health plans have their own portals, allowing them to interact with their members, but hospitals and other healthcare providers want an agnostic system that can connect with all payers.
Cerino said HealthVault Community Connect could eventually be used by hospitals and physicians to create proactive care plans that focus on preventive medicine and wellness, driving down healthcare costs for both the patient and the provider. By allowing the patient to grant access to the e-health record account to physicians, family members and others, the portal gives patients more control over their own healthcare plans, and thus the ability to affect costs.
“This is a piece of the workflow that a lot of people have tried to crack the nut but haven’t been able to do it successfully,” he said.