On the HealthVault push by Microsoft...

It's a nice try, for Microsoft to try to get into the verticals and push for HealthVault, a free service for consumers to upload their health records, to be shared with physicians etc. But it's not going to work.

The effort is reminiscent of Microsoft to tackle single-signon (SSO) across the web with its Passport service which fails quite miserably. So happens that HealthVault is going to have to deal with all those issues and hurdles that made Passport fail.

There is the privacy concern. There are consumer worries that they don't want their sensitive information to be stored and held by one company. The list goes on.

It's also a chicken-and-egg riddle that Microsoft needs to tackle. If it has amassed a big enough eco-system, to have enough physicians and hospitals and insurance companies to adopt it, then consumers could be forced to do it. We can be quite certain that the chicken (of whatever comes first) is not going to be the consumers. If there is nothing (no patient records) for the physicians to see, then they're not going to use it. Ditto with hospitals. As to insurance companies, would they relinquish their tight grip on pretty much everything.

It's another Mount Everest for Microsoft. It's a nice try. But I don't see it's going to amount to anything substantial. Let it go on record on this day, and I'll revisit my blog in two years' time to see how well my prediction fares. :)