Yesterday the Emerging Business team had the pleasure of hosting VCs at our Silicon Valley campus at our first roundtable on Microsoft's investments in the Health Care space. Distinguished members of the new Health Solutions Group ( a product team formed about 2 years ago) gave a hearty pitch to VCs about our new suite of platform products and opportunities for VCs to invest in the Microsoft Healthcare ecosystem.
The center of the pitch was around HealthVault, which is a free web based platform that enables patients to store and share information with hospitals and physicians using enhanced security and privacy measures. The team was careful to point out that HealthVault is NOT a PHR (Personal Health Record) System - which is what Google is building. Rather its a way for individuals to store and share their health information. Its a shared data platform that allows multiple applications to work with a persons Health Data, attempting to integrate the silos of consumer data that typically exists in duplicate forms across many different entities in the Health care ecosystem (Hospitals, Health plans, employer databases, pharmacies etc).
The event had three sections: an introduction to the charter of the Health Solutions Group by Nate McLemore, Director of Business Development; an Overview of HealthVault by Grad Conn, Sr Director of Product Marketing and finally the Health Vault Partner Strategy by Bill Ried, Director of Platform Strategy. Grad Conn's description clarified a lot of questions in my mind about what HealthVault is - not a PHR - but used an analogy to PayPal. Its an enabler system - which can be customized by application providers into many cool healthcare apps - and will only be visible by the HealthVault logo - similar to how Paypal enables payments in lots of different apps and is only visible through the logo. Finally Bill Reid talked about the opportunities for partnership with Microsoft and showed demos of many different application ideas for VCs to think about.
They also talked about the Be Well Fund - which is a $3million dollar fund available in total for non profit institutions to build cool Healthcare apps on top of HealthVault. The team is currently looking at proposals - so if interested - please submit your proposals to the HealthVault team before the end of the month - and winners will be announced at the Health Vault partner conference in May.
We had a lunch networking session where VCs could interact, get up close and personal with many members of the Health Solutions team, ask questions and exchange information. Most VCs I talked to found the event very useful. Our team hosts roundtables like this on different market spaces every few months in several locations around the world. If you are a VC, look out for invitations to these events as you will find the insight very useful. For more information please go to the HealthVault website at http://www.healthvault.com or contact me and I will be happy to give you pointers.
