Microsoft adds consumer-friendly face to its HealthVault platform

Microsoft launched on October 1 a beta of a new MSN service aimed at helping consumers manage their own health information.

The new service, known as My Health Info, is based on Microsoft's HealthVault. HealthVault is a software and services platform that is hosted on Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud-computing environment. The service makes use of Silverlight and allows users to search for health-related topics via Bing.

My Health Info is designed to allow consumers to store all kinds of personal health information, like childrens' vaccination schedules, prescription records, blood sugar levels, etc. It also will allow consumers to monitor "topical areas of interest," like swine flu. The service can be configured to maintain separate records on multiple people, so that a user could manage information on multiple family members.

At the end of August in 2009, Microsoft removed the two-year-old beta tag from HealthVault. There's no word on when Microsoft expects to do the same with the new MSN health service.

My Health Info makes use of the same security and privacy mechanisms that HealthVault itself does. All health data is encrypted; every time data is changed or read, a log is generated; and HTTPS is the protocol via which information is passed, according to Microsoft officials.

Microsoft created the new service to serve the 83 percent of people who search for health-related information on the Web, officials said. Serving ads on health content is also a huge opportunity for the company.