After reading Doc Searls’ post Health Care or Health snare, I decided to try out M$ HealthVault and see what if any use it would be to me. Boredom ensued, and here I am writing about the experience.
I found the requirement to change my, unused Hotmail/Passport account, password to something stronger to be annoying along with the 20 minute timeout for using the system, and the inability to efficiently work with Firefox.
HealthVault is a neat concept, but alas it just seems to be a glorified file-sharing platform allowing the user to upload any file and provide an Access Control List like property to the files by email addresses and expiration date. I first decided to upload an image, which the system recognized as an image but would only let me view it by downloading the image. I’m sure this is the case with other file types as well. Having to download documents, and allowing for possible changes this could easily become a nightmare with different revisions and such. I’m thinking a Google Docs would be much more smart way to share docs.
Another interesting thing I saw, there is no visible limit to the file size your allowed to upload. How much space are they letting us use up for our records? I’m attempting to create and load a large Jpeg image right now to simulate an MRI, but it’s not working quite right. I wish I had an actual MRI file to try. I’m also trying to upload a series of larger binary files from 5MB to 20MB, generated via /dev/urandom. The largest size I’ve been able to upload is 5MB, and still got an error; “There was a problem in your last request. Please review the following issues: * Please specify a valid file.” Ohwell.
“I believe that many of our health care problems, including the high number of people killed each year by bad or absent data, can only be solved by a fully decentralized system, rather than by a centralized one (or ones) run by governments, businesses, or some combination of both.” - Doc
I fully agree with Doc, that our health records should be decentralized, and strongly protected. Perhaps M$ should think about integrating HealthVault into their Windows Home Media Server idea, and then making the storage a free and open standard so others can build off it. But we all know they won’t.
[tags]health, health records, access control list, records management, file sharing, Microsoft, thoughts, usability, questions, Doc Searls, decentralized[/tags]
