News Conference Call – Microsoft HealthVault & Kaiser Permanente Pilot Program

HOLLY POTTER: Good morning, everyone. This is Holly Potter, vice president of public relations for Kaiser Permanente. We are happy that you could all join us here this morning. With us here today representing Kaiser Permanente and Microsoft are Anna-Lisa Silvestre, Kaiser Permanente’s vice president for online services, and Peter Neupert, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for the Health Solutions Group.

As you may know, National Health IT Week begins today. Across the country, particularly in Washington, D.C., national thought leaders will be discussing ways to leverage IT to transform healthcare delivery. With this in mind, we are pleased to be here to discuss today’s announcement that Kaiser Permanente and Microsoft will pilot health data transfer from the Kaiser Permanente personal health record, My Health Manager, to the Microsoft Health Vault consumer platform.

The accompanying news release for this announcement crossed the wires at 7:30 a.m. Pacific Time, and is available at both of our companies’ corporate news sites. We will begin with brief comments from both parties and then open the floor to questions.

Before we get started, let me remind you that this call is being recorded. The replay will be available shortly after the conclusion of today’s call at both companies’ Web sites. With that, I’d like to turn it over to Anna-Lisa.

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: Good morning, everybody. Today we’re very pleased to announce we’ll be working with Microsoft in a pilot program to test the exchange of data between Kaiser Permanente’s My Health Manager and Microsoft’s Health Vault. Many of you may be aware Kaiser Permanente has made an unprecedented effort over the last few years to put the consumer at the center of the care experience. And we’ve demonstrated that technology transforms the way that healthcare is delivered.

With this focus, we’ve provided our members with the ability to access their healthcare and health information in ways they want. We’re very pleased to be working with Microsoft on this next step. Microsoft shares our beliefs that providing consumers with control over their personal health information helps them better manage their health and the health of their family.

Many in the industry today talk about the future of healthcare being online. At Kaiser Permanente, the future is already here. The success of our personal health record (PHR) , My Health Manager, has been quite exciting. By year-end, we’ll have nearly three million active users. Since our model allows for true integration of health needs online, today Kaiser Permanente members can e-mail their doctors, schedule appointments, access detailed medical information such as test results, [have the] ability to refill prescriptions and more.

Powered by clinical data entered by physicians and other clinicians, My Health Manager is more relevant to consumers than the standard claim-based PHRs on the market today. With the shared record, patients are able to connect with their physicians and manage their health. For example, a member today can have a cholesterol test in the morning at the lab and by afternoon the results will be online. That member can go and learn more about what that test result means, e-mail their doctor if they have a question, and then enroll in an online program, all in just a few clicks.

While other PHR offerings today have experienced slow user adoption, we’re seeing rapid and consistent growth. 30 percent of our members actively use online services, and in some of our areas, it’s over 50 percent of our membership. Members love the ease of use, the ease and convenience of being able to see their information and have access to a wide range of programs.

Working with Microsoft HealthVault allows us to extend this functionality by allowing our members to combine health information from many sources. We recognize not all healthcare happens in one healthcare system, and it’s increasingly important that consumers have an easy and trusted way to access information that comes from multiple sources.

So for this capability to work, we both recognize it needs to be reliable, secure, and easy to use. For these reasons, we’re going to pilot this initially with Kaiser Permanente employees, and then this fall evaluate and determine whether we’ll extend this capability with Health Vault to our 8.7 million members.

It’s clear consumers are going online for health information. We recognize that and the future of healthcare must include an interoperable system to give Americans comprehensive access and control over their own health data. We see this partnership as a first step in exploring this possibility.

Peter, would you like to add anything?

PETER NEUPERT: Thank you, Anna-Lisa, good morning everyone. We’re excited to be partnering with Kaiser, who has demonstrated success in leadership in their online My Health Manager. We’re excited that we will be able to learn the lessons that they’ve learned by putting the infrastructure in place over the last several years and bring that to the HealthVault platform.

Today, we’re starting the second HealthVault Solutions Conference, where we hope to have many exciting partners working with us to bring health into the age of the Internet. So with that, I think I’ll stop and open up for questions.

(Extended pause.)

OPERATOR: Joe Guder (Ph.), your line is open.

JOE GUDER: Good morning. Many of the capabilities that HealthVault will offer, Kaiser already offers its members through its PHR such as secure messaging, searchable reference content and health risk assessment applications. So my question is: What specific HealthVault functions available today will Kaiser piloting employees have access to that they cannot get today from My Health Manager?

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: This is Anna-Lisa Silvestre. That’s a great question. Today, we don’t have an easy way for members to have one place to store any of the data they may get from devices such as blood pressure monitoring machines or glucose. So in the very first step, a couple of things that HealthVault will extend to our own membership, and that’s information from different equipment that they may have in their home. I expect that Health Vault will soon have a much wider range of health behavior change applications that may not be there today, but with the platform conference this week and the amount of development that’s about to go on, I expect that it won’t be a static platform and we’ll soon see a lot more available.

JOE GUDER: OK, but would that be the only capability right now that you don’t already offer?

PETER NEUPERT: Joe, I’m not sure what you mean by “only.” What we’re looking with regard to the HealthVault platform is to create an ecosystem which is tens if not hundreds of applications that share and re-use data.

JOE GUDER: OK, but excuse me, sir, they’re going to decide in the fall whether to expand this pilot. So this pilot will be using the Microsoft capabilities that HealthVault presently has, not that its vendor partners will be bringing on in the coming months and years. So I’m trying to figure out exactly what besides an easy way to store data from certain personal monitoring devices, what else the Kaiser employees will be testing from HealthVault that they cannot get from their PHR now because this is a short pilot program. So they’re going to be testing your current capabilities right now.

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: Right. Think of this first phase, as we have, as one of the most important things to test in the very short term is the reliability of the data exchange. Does data go from one place to another securely and reliability. As those capabilities fill up, we expect that people will benefit from all kinds of applications.

JOE GUDER: Okay, so this is going to be a real limited pilot, but give you enough confidence to know that you can exchange data between the two organizations?

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: Exactly. So it’s really important to have small tests of change, and I’d say the longer-term benefit is that the application support people who look up their personal health information and then want to make a change.

OPERATOR: John Moore (Ph.), your line is open.

JOHN MOORE: Thank you. By the way, this is great news, glad to see this happening, and congratulate you both. What I’d like to first know, Anna-Lisa, is can you maybe detail for us exactly what data will be transferred in this test pilot? Are you looking at everything in terms of say secure communication notes, the clinicals and labs? Or are you looking at a distinct subset?

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: In the beginning, it’s going to be a subset. It’ll be a health summary, and that includes immunizations, allergies, conditions and demographics.

JOHN MOORE: Will it also include medications?

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: And medications.

JOHN MOORE: OK. So it will be basically, it sounds like a CCR-type of thing.

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: Actually, it’s a CCD kind of thing.

JOHN MOORE: Oh, you’re using CCD? OK.

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: We’re using CCD.

JOHN MOORE: OK. And the next question for you, Anna-Lisa, will you be also considering other platforms similar to HealthVault?

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: We —

JOHN MOORE: To provide flexibility to the user or consumer?

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: Over time, I expect that there will be many platforms available to consumers. In the early stages, we’re very interested in testing the industry standard for continuity of care document exchange and we’ll always be looking very carefully and closely at privacy and security models. It’s unlikely we would be doing data exchange with every PHR vendor in the marketplace because of scale.

(Break for direction, long pause.)

ANNA-LISA SILVESTRE: If there are no further questions, we’ll close today’s call. Additional information is available on both the Kaiser Permanente and Microsoft Web sites, and thank you for your time today.