Cerner老板对Googlehealth, MS healthVault不感冒

张琨

Google Inc. has approached Cerner Corp. about a partnership, but Cerner officials don't sound eager to entangle themselves with the Web-search Goliath.
That's because the proposed partnership relates to Google Health, the personal health record site launched earlier in May in beta form.
The overture hasn't led to substantive talks, Cerner President Trace Devanny said, because Cerner doesn't see much value in Google Health or HealthVault, a similar site that Microsoft Corp. launched in October.
Cerner CEO Neal Patterson referred to the sites during a May 23 shareholders meeting as "electronic shoeboxes," requiring consumers to do much of the data importing and updating.
Personal health records, which allow electronic access to medical and prescription records from multiple points of care, are a drop in Cerner's revenue bucket, which was filled beyond the $1.5 billion mark in 2007. But that could change if pending federal legislation succeeds in creating a national network of independent health record banks, creating revenue streams for collecting patient data, hosting it and selling it in aggregate form to researchers.
By entering the personal health record fray, Google and Microsoft may help advance such new policy "because their voice is so much bigger than ours," Patterson said.
But when it comes to actually delivering personal health record services, Patterson said, Cerner is better positioned because its software collects data from "the actual processes of health care" -- at the bedside, doctor's office, labs and pharmacies.
"We've already had Google coming to us, wanting to partner with us, because they know we've got the real data," Patterson told Cerner shareholders.
Google Health's pilot partners include three pharmacy chains and a couple of academic medical centers that have agreed to send patient data to the site. Users who want comprehensive data from care providers plugged into their records have to do it themselves or pay Google Health partner MediConnect Global, an online record retrieval service. Their cost is $98 for as much as 100 pages.
By gobbling up a health care IT company down the line, Google or Microsoft conceivably could expand their health care scope to go after the record-banking revenue Cerner hopes to reap.
But Richard Close, an analyst who covers Cerner for Jefferies & Co., said he doesn't think the new Web-based record sites will have much effect on Cerner, whose core business is automating hospital and physician office functions.