Microsoft is shaking up the consumer health technology landscape today with their launch of HealthVault. The site allows anyone to sign up and store and share all of your health information and the health information of your family (even pets). The most intriguing part of the application is how Microsoft has offloaded much of the data entering, viewing, and manipulating work to third parties. Organizations like the AHA build blood pressure trackers and hardware companies like Johnson & Johnson allow data from the devices to feed into the HealthVault.

So in a way Microsoft has offloaded much of the user experience of storing health information to third parties. While this probably helped them get a jump on Google and other players in getting the product out, I think it leads to a very disjointed experience. I need to go to the AHA to enter my blood pressure and to another program with another set of visualization tools to look at another type of health measurement. A good move would be to create a Facebook style hosting platform where these third parties could host the front ends of their applications within a section of the HealthVault, or at least have a place where viewing and data entry are accessible.

The thing that I like most is the downloadable Connection Center application. It syncs the data from a variety of hardware monitors and uploads them to your Health Vault account. In the end, it’s this kind of usefulness and ease of use that is needed for people to make the leap to use a system like this. Privacy is always a concern, but time and time again we see the initial privacy scare fade away with every new technology. Remember when online banking seemed like a gamble? There’s a threshold at which the usefulness of the new paradigm mitigated our privacy fears.

But here’s where Microsoft’s partner strategy takes a twist. By having you give access to a third party to enter data, your information is always going through another party besides Microsoft. This seems a bit strange, akin to Citibank making me funnel all my transactions through Paypal. Because of that Health Vault really should have at least some basic information entry and editing so that it can work in a complete silo.

I’m so glad to see New York City looking out for their citizens and cutting out transfat from restaurant foods. Transfat is a terribly unhealthy substance used as a cheap substitute for natural saturated fat sources, and a large part of the cause for the unhealthy image saturated fats have gotten.
Some argue that banning transfat is going too far and is really paternalistic. I believe this move is more clearly warranted than antismoking bills due to the relatively undetectable nature of transfat. While smoking does harm the health of others around the smoker, at least they are aware and can make the choice to move. When restaurants sneak transfat substitutes into food, it hurts everyone in the restaurant (unfortunately there’s no ‘transfat free’ seating area in most restaurants) and it is difficult for the consumers to avoid the substance short of not eating out.

This is a case that I think it is good to have the government intervention. Free market competition is forcing restauranteurs to use the cheapest health harming substances to compete.
The consumer side of the market is unable to demand transfat free food through their eating choices and purchasing decisions because they are unable to discern who is using transfat substitutes. The government’s action here is good to provide protection of consumer health where the consumer market is not able to do so effectively.