Microsoft HealthVault Goes Live in Germany as Assignio

At the start of this year, Microsoft announced that it had licensed the rights to HealthVault to Siemens AG (Siemens IT Solutions and Services division), and that the platform will be offered on the German market.

Well, as of last week, Siemens IT Solutions has launched Assignio, designed as a health platform for German citizens, powered by Microsoft HealthVault.

According to Jens Dommel, Regional HealthVault Lead Germany, Siemens is responsible for the operations and marketing of Assignio, enabling Germans to tap the power of the Cloud for a new approach to their health and wellness.

“By introducing HealthVault to the German market Siemens will help bridge the information gap between citizens and the professional medical and healthcare organizations that they interact with on an ongoing basis,” Dommel said.

“HealthVault provides a central repository for people to record data on their health & wellness, ranging across exercise regularity, diet management, weight monitoring, temperature and blood pressure monitoring.

“Anyone using Assignio will be able to manage their own health and the health of their families and will be able to store data and easily share this with doctors, hospitals and pharmacies.”

Assignio is focused on no less than 4 categories of services. In this regard, users leveraging the platform will be able to do prevention of illnesses, but also deal with fitness and wellness.

Still, Assignio is not offered to patients, but also to health professionals, with such services as patient service and eMedication.

“There is a long line of applications being developed for the HealthVault platform. Data can be entered manually into the platform, through the applications or automatically from a range of compatible devices, such as weight scales, blood pressure monitors and pedometers.

The most important aspect of this service is that individuals are in complete control of their own health management and can decide who has access to what information,” Dommel added.

Germany is the second European market in which HealthVault went live after the United Kingdom. At the same time, Germany is also the forth country worldwide whose citizens can take advantage of Microsoft’s e-health platform, after the UK, Canada and the US.