10/15/2011
Signed up for Microsoft Health Vault, which is “a trusted place for people to organize, store, and share health information online”. Once I signed up, they offered a huge list of other services that have information that I could place inside my Health Vault account. I clicked on every single one of these services and evaluated them.
Some services are more integrated than others. Walgreens, for instance, has this URL: https://www.walgreens.com/pharmacy/healthvault/welcome.jsp. I had to sign up for a Walgreens account, and the signup process involved the normal non-health info type of signup.
11/19/2011
Earlier this week I had a physical with my a doctor. The health center has a shiny Microsoft-based system here: https://mychart.dupagemedicalgroup.com/default.asp, and I was excited to check it out.
The method of signing in was kind of weird– I had to stop by the front desk and give them some info so they could assign me with a code to get in. This combination of a physical reality (a visit) with the online reality seems to be an important component for these people.
Upon signing in, I was surprised at the paucity of information. In my appointment, I had blood pressure, height, weight, ECG (rate of 55!), and other (cough) procedures done. I expected to see the results of these tests (the results of which they told me, right on the spot) when I clicked on “Health Summary”, I expected to see the same stuff, but I did not. Just this:
| Preventative health care | 11/10/2011 |
| Screen for colon cancer | 11/10/2011 |
| Family history of colon cancer | 11/10/2011 |
All of the links for these items go to Medline Plus, which is maintained by the National Institutes of Health. They have an amazing store of information about specific conditions like colon cancer. That page has more than a hundred external links to dozens of (presumably reliable) sources of information. (NOTE: I added this page to Update Scanner on 11/19/2011 in order to see how often the page is updated).