After the Cleveland Clinic, Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) was the next hospital system to allow their customers to export their health records from BIDMC’s homegrown “PatientSite” to Google Health.  Yesterday, BIDMC announced that the customer now has a choice and may also export their records to Microsoft’s HealthVault.

In speaking to one of my contacts at Microsoft, he stated that the beauty of the BIDMC announcement, at least from Microsoft’s perspective, is that BIDMC took on complete responsibility for making this happen. BIDMC simply asked the HealthVault folks early on what were the required steps and after that, they did it all themselves.  No hand holding or nudges from Microsoft.

BIDMC is a progressive hospital with a progressive management team that includes CIO John Halamka and CEO Paul Levy.  I have written before on some of their proactive initiatives and perceive them as an early adopter.  The BIDMC actions demonstrated here that we will see others emulate in the future are the following:

1. Acknowledgment that the consumer has a clear, unhindered right to access their records and put them wherever they desire.
2. Pick no favorites in the platform race, much too early for that.   Instead, plan to participate/allow access to all major platform plays (today there is but three, Dossia, Google Health and HealthVault).
3. Take personal responsibility to make it happen. Don’t wait for some gift or incentive, instead just decide that this is the right thing to do for your customer.

What do I see as the next step for early adopters like BIDMC?  Not just exporting consumer data into a platform, but begin importing consumer entered data as well, e.g., biometric measurements.