Could a Linkage Between Amalga and HealthVault Become a Centerpiece of Microsoft’s Healthcare Strategy?

Writing in ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley ponders the question of whether it might make sense for Microsoft to link HealthVault (HV) and Amalga.

I’ll take this a step further and ask “Could a linkage between HealthVault and Amalga become a centerpiece of Microsoft’s broader health care strategy?”

Ms. Foley writes:

For now, there is no direct connection between Amalga and HealthVault, Microsoft’s patient-information software/service combo, a beta of which Microsoft fielded last October. That said, it sounds like something is in the works. From the aformentioned Microsoft spokesman:

“There is an Amalga-HealthVault patient portal pilot underway where information from Amalga can be pulled into a patient’s HealthVault record. Microsoft recognizes that healthcare is a complex problem that will require solutions both within complex internal hospital systems (Amalga) and within the complex external healthcare ecosystem (HealthVault) and the need to integrate the two. Stay tuned for future developments on that front.”

What are some of the potential synnergies between Amalga and HV?

• Complementary functionality.  Amalga is designed to pull together disparate data sources within a hospital or health system (e.g., lab, ER, imaging data that comes from incompatible IT systems). HV creates a patient controlled data repository and also accepts data from disparate sources.
• Complementary data about patients. HealthVault and Amalga both will gather patient data, but it will be different data.  Amalga will have greater connectivity to a patient’s EHR (clinical data), while HealthVault will have better connectivity to personal health information and a patient’s PHR.  Having more and better patient data is a no brainer.
• Better access to medical data for HealthVault. By itself, HealthVault could be seen as competitive or disruptive to health care providers. A connection to Amalga could soften this threat and position HV to take more of a carrots rather than sticks posture in working with health care providers.
• Joint partnership development.  Amalga brings a foot-in-the-door with many health care providers; HealthVault is focus on developing complementary partnerships with vendors building applications around using PHI stored in the HV data repository. These could be highly complementary.
• Joint program design.  I can envision Amalga and HV building totally new programs for customers based on their respective capabilities. For example, many hospitals are interested in developing more ongoing relationships with their patients; today their relationship with patients is sporadic and revolves around occasional procedures or inpatient admissions.  With appropriate patient permission, HV data could be packaged to help hospitals sustain an ongoing dialogue with patients.
• Strengthened competitive positioning against Google Health. GH is building it’s presence in health care from scratch; it seems to be focusing heavily on a business-to-consumer (B2C) strategy, i.e., signing up patients directly. It looks like much of the differentiation between GH and HealthVault will be GH’s B2C strategy pitted against Microsoft’s business-to-business (B2B) strategy. HealthVault and Amalga both are already heavily B2B focused.

I’d bet this is just the start of a list of potential synnergies.

Could a linkage between HealthVault and Amalga become a centerpiece of Microsoft’s broader health care strategy?

Absolutely.