HealthVault Portal for Hospitals

HealthVault Community Connect, announced at a Mar. 2010 healthcare conference, is a combination of SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies for creating portals that consolidate patient and treatment data in hospitals. Patient health records (PHRs) on the portal can be shared with other care providers, such as specialists, and stored online in Microsoft’s HealthVault service. The system has the potential to speed care while reducing errors and avoiding duplication of medical tests. It also illustrates how Microsoft’s specialized healthcare products can promote adoption of common server applications, such as SharePoint.

Sharing Healthcare Records

Announced at the 2010 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, HealthVault Community Connect uses technology from Microsoft’s Amalga Unified Intelligence System to collect data from multiple sources within a hospital and make it available to patients and healthcare providers through a SharePoint portal.

Patients can enter their medical history, current medications, insurance, and other information, such as gender and age, before they arrive at the hospital. This eliminates the need for the hospital to create a new PHR when the patient arrives and reenter data multiple times during treatment, saving patient effort and reducing delays in care. During and after treatment, the hospital can post data generated from the patient’s treatment, medical imaging, or laboratory tests to the Community Connect portal, where, at the patient’s discretion, the referring physician and other medical professionals can access the PHR from their offices.