While this is clearly part of the marketing effort Microsoft launched yesterday with the advent of HealthVault, Bill Gates has an interesting op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal (may require subscription). He makes some interesting points, the general tone of which I agree. First, he addesses the data silos that exist in the various part of our massive healthcare system and the problem of data liquidity:

At the heart of the problem is the fragmented nature of the way health information is created and collected. Few industries are as information-dependent and data-rich as health care. Every visit to a doctor, every test, measurement, and procedure generates more information. But every clinic, hospital department, and doctor’s office has its own systems for storing it. Today, most of those systems don’t talk to each other.

This is a topic near and hear to us here at PointClear, and was of particular interest to folks at the Health 2.0 conference.

The problem is, how does one maintain security and privacy once the walls of the silos start breaking down? Microsoft may do a great job securing the HealthVault platform, but what about all the third-party vendors and partners who write applications that use HealthVault? If health information sloshes back and forth between these third parties, and some of the third parties have insufficient security which can potentially lead to data breaches, then how secure is HealthVault in practice?

That makes this comment by Mr. Gates a little frightening:

No one company can — or should — hope to provide the single solution to make all of this possible. That’s why Microsoft is working with a wide range of software and hardware companies, as well as with physicians, hospitals, government organizations, patient advocacy groups and consumers to ensure that, together, we can address critical issues like privacy, security and integration with existing applications.

The ‘wide range’ of companies Microsoft intend to work with would seem to have a negative impact on ‘issues like privacy, security’.