Your Health Data, Plugged In to the Web

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Getting doctors to participate in such services, experts said, would probably require more government regulation.

"Because of the way our health-care system is financed, it's made it hard to raise the capital necessary to make these conversions," said David W. Bates, a Harvard Medical School professor and chief of general medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Other countries have single-payer health systems, which makes it easier to pay for the conversion."

The biggest barrier to digitizing, physicians say, is the lack of federal standards for how the software should work. Those health-care providers who have digitized use different software products that can't communicate with one another.

For the past several years, Health and Human Services officials have worked on standards under which software vendors would store data the same way. They are still determining how to get data to transfer seamlessly from one program to another. In the meantime, HealthVault has worked with vendors to translate records from different programs into a universal format, according to Sean Nolan, who helped design HealthVault.

Some insurance companies have offered free online health record-services, sparking criticism from privacy advocates.

"You have to have lost your mind to give them any more info about you than they have," said Deborah Peel, founder of Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, which helped Microsoft craft HealthVault's privacy practices. "The revolutionary thing about HealthVault is that it gives consumers complete control over their records and guarantees no one can access that information without their consent."

Other consumer advocates have suggested that the online aggregation of data, whether through HealthVault or its competitors, could be good for patients more indirectly.

"It would be nice to have a pool database across millions of patients," said Robert Krughoff, president of Consumers' Checkbook. "You could see, of all the patients who've had a prostectomy [removal of the prostate gland], what percent had what complications. It would be one way to evaluate different procedures and treatments, since we don't have a way of evaluating their effectiveness in the long run now."