Gary Baluta, our Director of Product Management, and I are attending the Microsoft Connected Health Conference today and tomorrow. I’m a little surprised by the level of attendance. I was expecting a couple hundred IT geeks to show up, but clearly I didn’t anticipate the level of interest across all levels of healthcare in what Microsoft is doing with HealthVault and Amalga.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve heard so far is the announcement from the president-elect of the AMA…but more on that later…
Peter Neupert, Corporate VP of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft, opened the conference with a brief keynote, then kicked off a panel comprised of Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton; Governor Michael Leavitt; and Dr. David Kibbe, a prominent physician in the EHR space, and Senior Advisor to the AAFP.
Quotable Quotes
| Dr. Reinhardt: | Healthcare in the United States is “like being pushed into Macy’s, blindfolded, and being asked to buy a shirt.” |
| “If you teach a parrot to say ‘supply and demand’, you have an economist…” | |
| Gov. Leavitt: | “There is no ‘healthcare system’ in America…it’s a ‘healthcare sector’ that we’re trying to transform into a ‘system’.” |
| “What if buying a car was like buying healthcare? After you bought a car, you would receive one bill from the tire manufacturer, another from the company that made the steering wheel, etc.” | |
| “The problem [preventing healthcare reform] isn’t a lack of political will. There is an overabundance of political will. Whenever reform is suggested, people unholster their political wills and aim them at each other.” | |
| “One man’s waste is another man’s living.” | |
| Dr. Kibbe: | “What happens [to healthcare in the United States] if we don’t reinvigorate primary care? In the United States, 30% of physicians are primary care providers, and the other 70% are specialists. In other industrialized countries, the numbers are reversed.” |
The panel discussion was very interesting and, to be honest, the fact that we have people as smart as the panel members contributing to the healthcare reform discussion is very encouraging. Now if we could just get about 535 people on Capitol Hill to butt out…
Following the panel (and a brief Q&A session), Dr. James Rohack, President-Elect of the AMA, was introduced, and he reacted to the panel. Then he announced a partnership between Microsoft and the AMA to provide data stored in HealthVault to physicians via a portal that will be released by the AMA in early 2010.
I think this is a pretty big deal. For decades, small players (EMR/EHR and portal companies, for example) have been attempting to transform healthcare at the grassroots level, and have had very little success (as measured by penetration into the physician market).
I have to believe that a partnership between two huge players like Microsoft and the AMA will be much more effective at getting technology into physician offices. Think about it: Once the AMA tells physicians to start using their portal to acquire healthcare information about their patients, how many doctors are not going to do it? Especially if the portal is provided for free, or for a reasonable fee (no mention of cost was made).
This has to be seen as a major coup for Microsoft, in its competition against Google Health. Google Health has been harshly criticized for basing its medical records, in part at least, on billing records (the ICD-9 codes reported with procedures). That highly publicized criticism, along with AMA’s endorsement of HealthVault, could be huge.
There is perhaps no bigger opportunity in the world than to transform healthcare.
Information technology will play a central role…and software will be the catalyst for innovation.
Health is one of Microsoft’s top investment areas.
- Steve Balmer
CEO, Microsoft
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