Bytemarks

This past Wednesday’s, June 18 big announcement at HMSA hit all the major media in Hawaii. HMSA, in partnership with American Well and Microsoft HealthVault will offer online health services to the residents of Hawaii. The Star-Bulletin had an article by Kristen Constillio that went into good detail about what the service will entail. The article was also linked to a video that ran on KITV on the evening news. In comparison it appeared like the Honolulu Advertiser pulled its article right off the press release. What was interesting was the amount of national coverage this announcement got. It seemed like every publication from Forbes to InformationWeek wrote something about this partnership. Just Google HMSA American Well and you will see how widespread this announcement got. When you think about it, this is a pretty big deal and could mark a sea change in the delivery of healthcare and personal health records. Ever since my involvement in telecom, I’ve been interested in telemedicine. Application partnerships like these will bring telemedicine to the masses. This is health care delivered right to you at home. Whether this new service will be a success still remains to be seen. It will depend on users feeling comfortable enough to use it, whether health care providers (i.e. physicians) will adopt it and what the insurers will cover for the online service. We will learn more once the service is rolled out in Jan 2009. As Matt Holt points out in his blog post, Hawaii is a logical place for HMSA and American Well to roll out this offering. It will compete directly with what Kaiser is offering in this market. So here I am again in the middle of it all. What I would like to know is where was the mai tais and lei Matt was talking about. We never heard anything until the KITV 10pm news.