14 DAY TRIAL // Google is breathing down Microsoft's neck, as the Mountain View-company comes closer to releasing a health service that will compete directly with a platform that its rival from Redmond already has had in place since 2007. At the end of October 2007, Marissa Mayer, Google's head of search, indicated that the long-awaited Google Health initiative will be brought to life in early 2008. At that time, Mayer failed to deliver the actual date for the unveiling of the Google health platform, but the Mountain View-based search giant is working to make its storage and organization capacities an infrastructure for a new service focused on medical care and patient records. Mayer underlined that the platform was a natural evolution for the search engine, as users increasingly rely on Google to access Internet health information.
The Mountain View-based company is on the verge of introducing Google Health Beta, a service that will permit users to build customized online health profiles, to access and download medical records from doctors and pharmacies, receive personalized health guidance and relevant news, as well as search, find doctors, connect to health services and even share health information. While this is indeed a new step for Google, it is not the same for Microsoft. The Redmond company has introduced Microsoft HealthVault back in October 2007.
"We had a few very important design principles when we built HealthVault. We know that consumers are very concerned about the privacy of their private health data. Yet, at the same time we know from long experience that sharing the data leads to better outcomes, that it doesn't do any good just to collect the information and stick it in a lockbox, we need to make it reusable, so that people can gain understanding, and can gain the right information at the right time," stated Peter Neupert, Corporate Vice President Health Solutions Group, Microsoft, at the time of HelthVault's launch.
Essentially, there are little differences between Google's health platform and Microsoft's service. The features of both Google Health Beta and Microsoft HealthVault Beta are almost identical. The main difference is the fact that Microsoft offers via HealthVault a client application complementing the service, and even a SDK for developers. Google's platform appears to be delivered exclusively as an online service.
"So we started from the very beginning to design, build, and deliver new a system that puts the consumer in complete control of this data, at the finest granular element, but that allows for the sharing of that very data, under the control of the consumer, with any application that's connected to the HealthVault. So we've accomplished something that has never existed before, the opportunity to have private, secure data, and still make it shareable, and reusable, and we will show how we do that next," Neupert added.