UK Handing off their health records?

Federal Computer Week: U.K. mulls handing off national health records to Microsoft, Google

It will be interesting to see which one the UK chooses. Microsoft joined the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy to urge Congress to restore consumer control over PHI in 2007. Google has not.

MS signed Coalition letters in 2007 and 2009, and agreed to support the Coalition's tough privacy principles and health privacy rights in electronic systems. HealthVault was built to adhere to the Coalition's stringent privacy principles. Open, public promises by major corporations are taken very seriously by federal regulatory agencies and consumer advocates.

The promises by the technology corporations that joined the Coalition are a rebuke to other HIT vendors and the data mining industry that will do anything to get their hands on PHI for all sorts of uses that patients would never agree to.

Today, the clearest sign of serious corporate commitment to health privacy rights is joining the Coalition for Patient Privacy and standing with consumers to build an ethical, legal HIT system---the only kind that will be trusted and succeed.