Dr Microsoft May Be Watching You

You may recall a few weeks ago we mentioned a web application that lets you put your personal health records online, which could prove handy for travellers involved in a medical emergency whilst abroad. Well, here’s something for conspiracy theorists to mull over, Microsoft is getting in on the act with a similar idea, called HealthVault. At the moment it is limited to logging results from health monitoring gadgets onto USB flash memory devices but plans have been mooted for eventually you, your doctor or health insurance company to upload your medical records into a secure online storage facility and it can be accessed by a health professional anywhere in the world, with the appropriate permissions of course. I’ll leave it to you to guess the kind of response this will get, if it ever happens…