With all the recent focus on Google Health and even more distractions with the iPhone 3G announcement, it was probably easy to miss the June 9th announcement by Microsoft (MS) about its partnership with one of the nations leading managed care organizations, Kaiser Permanente (KP).

Probably in response to Google Health’s strong partnerships at launch (including Cleveland Clinic, Walgreens, CVS, Beth Israel, American Heart Association and many others), MS and KP have now partnered on a pilot program for “health data transfers” between KP’s My Health Manager and MS’s HealthVault PHR platform.

Already, My Health Manager’s more than 2 million users have convenient and easy online access to clinical information and health management tools, including e-mailing your doctor, online prescription refills and appointment scheduling. Connecting My Health Manager to the HealthVault platform will allow users to combine personal health information from Kaiser Permanente and a wide range of health and wellness management applications and devices such as blood pressure monitors…

Initially, the pilot program will only be open (voluntarily) to KP’s 159,000 employees. “If the pilot is successful, the program will be expanded to include Kaiser Permanente’s more than 8 million members“. That’s a pretty hefty number to start with for a pilot (that is, if they get good uptake from their employees), but once it’s open to the network, that will be HUGE!

Fard Johnmar from the HealthCareVox points out an interesting development in this partnership that he feels will give Microsoft “…a leg up in the PHR arena. Linking clinical information to advice from a physician makes the PHR much more valuable to patients“. Here’s the segment from the news release that he is referring to:

A distinction between Kaiser Permanente’s online health tool and others offered by insurers is the range and relevance of the information itself: In addition to containing benefits and eligibility information, My Health Manager also is powered by both clinical data entered by physicians, going much deeper than the standard claims-based PHRs on the market. For example, consumers can not only see a record of a test that they had, but also the result of that test and in some cases, direct feedback from their doctors about the result. Since both the patient and physician use the data in My Health Manager, consumers are actively using their Kaiser Permanente PHR to communicate with their physician and support their health goals.

I agree that this makes a very compelling case for using this PHR platform, especially here in the USA, where healthcare choices are impacted by so many different authorities and organizations (e.g. physicians, insurance, managed care, DTC advertising, etc.).

In fact, The HealthCare Blog had a recent post about a report entitled “Research Shows Healthcare Market Constituents Seek Information as Key to Solving the Affordability Crisis” (PDF file), which basically suggests a need for an “integrated health care management” system to close the communication gap between consumers, employers, payers and providers in order to better manage healthcare costs. Perhaps these new initatives by Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health are helping us do just that and get us one step closer to a better informed society of personal healthcare management.

If you want to hear a brief pre-release interview with Peter Neupert, Corporate VP of Microsoft Health Solutions Group and Anne-Lisa Silvestre, VP of Online Services at KP, you can listen to Matthew Holt’s interview here (MP3 file).

And finally, if you’re wondering why KP went with HealthVault over Google Health, here’s a brief explaination from the NY Times (thanks to THCB’s blog update):

Kaiser chose the Microsoft technology, even though Ms. Silvestre is a member of a group of health professionals advising Google. Ms. Silvestre said Kaiser also looked closely at Google, but was particularly impressed by Microsoft’s technology for protecting the privacy and security of personal data. And she noted that Microsoft and Kaiser are using the same Web-based format, called a Continuity of Care Document, or CCD. Ms.Silvestre said Google is initially focusing its efforts on a different format for Web health records, called Continuity of Care Record, or CCR…But these different Web standards, analysts say, are not a long-term obstacle to consumer health records from rival companies being able to share and view information. Google, for example, is committed to supporting both formats, and so is Microsoft…“Google will certainly be a player in this, and we look forward to working with them,” Ms. Silvestre said. “We’re all for consumer choice.”

Let the PHR wars begin !!!

BTW, as a related point of interest, Microsoft has just (June 23rd) announced that they are supporting the OpenID authentication platform for MS HealthVault — a first for Microsoft. However, as noted by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch, “…Health Vault will only support authentication from two OpenID providers: Trustbearer and Verisign. Whatever happened to the Open in OpenID?“