Matthew Holt – Page 60 – The Health Care Blog

State regulators challenge the rights to your DNA

Jun 16, 2008• 11

By Matthew Holt

It is something of a surprise that it popped up this way, but the establishment
challenge to Health 2.0 was going to start somewhere. And it appears to have started with two big states, New York & California ordering 13 companies to stop Gene Testing.

Karen Nickel, from the California Department of Public Health, argues that these companies are “operating without a clinical laboratory license in California. The genetic tests have not been validated for clinical utility and accuracy.”

But as those companies are outsourcing the testing anyway, that argument barely holds water. Here’s what Navigenics CEO Mari Baker said “Navigenics uses a doctor to transit orders and review results, and it relies on a state-certified lab testing company to do the gene tests.”

So what this really is about, of course, is who has the right to order a test? Is it you or do you have to go through a doctor? Or put another way, is it your DNA or is it the state’s?

Kaiser tiptoes into HealthVault & tells THCB about it, with UPDATE

Jun 9, 2008• 11

By Matthew Holt

Kaiser Permanente signed on this morning for a pretty extensive pilot with Microsoft,
allowing its 159,000 employees to copy their online health records into HealthVault. This is a big coup for Microsoft and a fairly ambitious move for KP which to this point hasn’t said much publicly about the data transferability it was going to provide for its members. This is a clear signal.

Assuming that the pilot is a success, presumably all Kaiser members using My Health Manager (over 2 million now and heading to 3 million at years end) will soon be able to move their data to HealthVault. We are potentially seeing the first real example of mass scale data interoperability onto a platform not connected to a health care organization. And obviously, Google is playing in this same space too.

Once the data is collected in HealthVault, there are lots of possibilities for what can be done with that data, and what services can be offered.

Back in the days when Justen Deal was causing havoc with HealthConnect, I had a somewhat unorthodox interview with Permanente’s Andy Wiesenthal — in which (without KP’s PR folks knowing) I called him in a taxi on a cell phone late on a Friday night. Perhaps it’s a mark of how far THCB has come (you decide if it’s good or bad) that in regular business hours on Friday, KP’s publicity machine lined me up for a pre-release interview with Peter Neupert, Corporate VP of Microsoft Health Solutions Group and Anne-Lisa Silvestre, VP of Online Services at KP.

Google Health — A serious test drive

Jun 5, 2008• 9

By Matthew Holt

After all the fuss, I thought that I should take Google Health for a real test drive. So I did. Given that it contains a gazillion screenshots, I did it in the form of a slide show and uploaded it to the slideshare.net website. To view it, you’re best off using the full screen mode (which you can get to by opening “view” (the middle of the three links below the slides, and then clicking the “full button” on the bottom right in the slide on slideshare).