You probably saw some of the headlines last week where Box announced that is supporting HIPAA and HITECH compliance, signing Business Associate Agreements, (BAAs) and integrating with several platform app partners such as Doximity, drchrono, TigerText, and Medigram to help seed its new healthcare ecosystem. I also announced that I was formally advising Box on their healthcare strategy.
I was drawn to Box because of all the lessons I learned at Google building a consumer-directed, personal health record (PHR), Google Health. Google Health allowed you to securely store, organize and share all of your medical records online and control where your data went and how it was managed. It was unlike the other PHRs in the industry that were tethered to the provider or payor or part of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.
Sound good? Well, it was in theory. The big issue with Google Health was aggregating your data from the disparate sources that stored data on you. We had to create a ton of point-to-point integrations with large health insurance companies, academic medical centers, hospitals, medical practices and retail pharmacy chains. All of these providers and payors were covered entities in the world of HIPAA and were required to verify a patient’s identity before releasing any data to them electronically. It was a very bumpy user experience for even the most super-charged, IT savvy consumer.
