Health Vault – The Health Care Blog

Microsoft HSG Bets Future on Amalga

May 3, 2011• 1

By JOHN MOORE

Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group (HSG), which has straddled the fence with consumer-facing (HealthVault) and corporate-facing (Amalga), is increasingly moving to the corporate side of the fence. Not that surprising considering that the consumer market continues to struggle (Google Health is in virtual mothball state, consumer adoption of HealthVault is nothing to write home about) and that HSG has now moved out of R&D and is now under the business solutions group, Dynamics. At the end of the day, HSG head Peter Neupert has to show that he can deliver the goods and Amalga is the horse he’s betting on (Note: Sentillion is there as well, but think of Sentillion as the gate-keeper to accessing Amalga).

Yet Amalga has gone through its share of birthing pains with some in the industry beginning to question its value.

Amalga has suffered from two significant problems, both inter-related. The first is that Amalga is an extremely powerful set of data aggregation and analytical tools, but it is more of a toolset then a product and this leads to long implementation time-frames and subsequently an inability to extract value quickly (ROI for Amalga is measured in years). For example, in 2009 Golden Living signed on to adopt Amalga and HealthVault. At last week’s Connected Health Conference, (CHC) Golden Living presented some remarkable results of how they are transforming long-term care through the use of Amalga. But in their presentation, Golden Living also stated that they knew full well when signing on to Amalga that this was going to be a multi-year effort and their implementation team has been given 5 years to put Amalga in place. Five years to fully implement a software solution is a very long-time and similar to the installs of the largest EHR systems. Unfortunately, many early Amalga customers did not have the foresight of Golden Living. In recent conversations with Microsoft, Chilmark has been told that significant resources are now being dedicated to improving time to value for Amalga. We’ll have to wait and see as the CHC sessions we attended on Amalga and HealthVault Community Connect, did not make this readily apparent.Continue reading…

Rest in Peace: Personal Health Records (PHRs)

Apr 18, 2011• 17

By JOHN M. GROHOL

While doing some research the other day on personal health records (PHRs), I came across this article, describing Revolution Health’s announcement — without much media attention — about dropping its PHR at the beginning of 2010. (Disclosure: I worked for Revolution Health in 2005-2006, and now have a business relationship with the company that acquired them, Everyday Health.)

The most interesting statement I found in this brief news article was, “The e-mail did not indicate why the company decided to terminate its PHR service. The company advised users to download their PHR as a .pdf file and save the document for their records.”

Ah, a PDF. Yes, that’ll make it extremely easy to get that data into some other PHR (sarcasm alert).

And that led me to understand the underlying problem with all PHRs today, and the problem PHRs have always had — nobody trusts the companies who offer them, and few people understand what they are or why they should care.

I kind of chuckle when I hear a company describe that a part of its business strategy is the personal health record. I first heard of a PHR back in 1999, when I worked for drkoop.com, at that time competing for the #1 spot as the leading consumer health website with WebMD (drkoop.com lost). Drkoop.com’s management had this brilliant idea that everybody would want — and pay for — a personal health record online. In fact, this was the founding principle of the company that eventually became drkoop.com (as seen in one of their SEC 10k filings from that time):

To say that the idea of a personal health record (or personal medical record, as they called it) has been kicking around the Internet for a long time would be an understatement. (Drkoop.com dropped the idea altogether after a falling out with their PHR development partner, HealthMagic.)

Our company was founded in July 1997 as Personal Medical Records, Inc. During 1997 our primary operating activities related to the development of software for Dr. Koop’s Personal Medical Record System.