You mentioned before two things and I wonder if they are at all contradictory. You said to whatever extent possible HealthVault will be as agnostic in terms of access platforms, but at the same time in order to port the data from some of these devices a user needs a Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC for HealthVault Connection Center. Is that going to change at some point or is it always going to be Windows PC only?
No, and just to be clear the only thing that is PC only is the HealthVault Connection Center and the drivers. We [at HealthVault and Microsoft] have no plans, for example, to build a HealthVault Connection Center equivalent for any other platform like a Linux desktop or a Mac OS X. That said, should somebody want to develop that we certainly wouldn’t stand in the way of it. Currently, though if you have data from a blood pressure cuff that you want to connect to HealthVault, you have to connect it to a PC and upload the data. If there is a demand among Mac users for some way to get data off their devices and into HealthVault then, for sure, we’ll support someone who wants to create that. It’s the same way we support Safari on Windows. We are not interested in cutting people off from a tool like HealthVault.
OK, any closing thoughts on the wireless angle for HealthVault?
Well, it is kind of interesting because this is not the first time I have had a discussion about devices. When it comes right down to it, including the wireless play in the consumer health space, whether you are talking about the healthcare home or remote monitoring of patients, what’s interesting to me is that it’s so unsettled whether or not the integration points will be through a Qualcomm scenario where they run and operate a network on behalf of a service and are also interested in supplying the chipsets to device manufacturers or if it’s going to be more of an AppStore scenario where people will develop apps for all the various platforms and the applications will speak directly to the cloud. The point is, ultimately people will want to make use of this data and they don’t want it to go someplace else where it’s isolated. That’s where HealthVault plays. Regardless of how the wireless device space in healthcare shakes out, HealthVault will always be open as an integration point to pull all this data together so users have a unified personal health database.
Thanks for your time today, George. Be sure to keep us up to date on any wireless initiatives going on at HealthVault.
Absolutely, particularly as we expand on our international foot print, because that’s where wireless becomes a much more important gateway to health information for a lot of people.
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