Microsoft gets its first award for HealthVault

Microsoft HealthVault has won its first industry award, from Frost & Sullivan, as the company ramps up the marketing of its hospital computing solutions.

The award is a "Best Practices" honor for the HealthVault platform which, analyst Priyanka Gouthaman writes, gives Microsoft "a distinct early-mover advantage" to  "gain significant industry acceptance."

The award notice said the HealthVault SDK has already been downloaded over 600,000 times.

The award comes at an important moment for Microsoft's health troops, who see hospitals and hospital networks as an immense growth opportunity now dominated by specialists like McKesson and Cerner.

Microsoft will keep the drumbeat going with a "HealthVault Solutions Conference" scheduled for June 9-10 near its headquarters.

Health Solutions corporate vice president Peter Neupert (above) will headline the event, but doctors in attendance will likely be more interested in Mehmet Oz of New York-Presbyterian/Columbia, an early adopter of the software system now called Amalga.

Neupert's name may be familiar because he headed the early MSNBC effort before leaving the company in 1998 to head Drugstore.Com.

Neupert also directed the Bush Administration's report “Revolutionizing Health Care Through Information Technology,” before coming back to head Microsoft health last year.

That combination of outside and government experience could prove crucial to Microsoft making inroads in a very difficult-to-crack industry.

At the June event Microsoft will also announce the winners of its Be Well Fund grants, a program announced at HIMMS to jump-start the creation of HealthVault applications.

We joked at the show that Google might apply for one in order to link the two companies' health care platforms. Hopefully the winners will be more interesting than that.