Chilmark Research is furiously working on its next report that will take an in-depth look at the three major platform plays, Dossia, Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault.  Shaping up to be an excellent report (in our humble opinion) with a target release date of mid-December.

One of the challenges in writing this report is taking what is a fairly new concept in IT, “Cloud Computing” and even newer, “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) and convey its implications to the healthcare sector.   Hard to do in a space that is changing so fast.

We foresee that this trend holds a lot of promise for the healthcare sector greatly accelerating the use of HIT, across the continuum (consumers, physicians, caregivers, etc.) for the simple reason that it removes the burden of infrastructure (hardware & much software) support and will likely be a hell of a lot easier to use then many of the client-server systems of today.

But we digress.

In looking at the three platform plays, we have a section in the report that addresses their operating models.  While doing research on the subject we stumbled across an excellent analysis of Google’s strategy by Nick Carr.  This is the clearest, most cogent analysis we have seen and is spot-on.

If you are even remotely interested in Google, we highly recommend reading Carr’s piece.

After reading one will quickly realize exactly why Google may be able to offer Google Health free forgoing the need for sponsored ads or selling data (even if it’s anonymized) to third parties, both fears that are frequently bantered about in the healthcare sector.  These fears appear to be ill-informed and many times are simply fear mongering by those either wanting to make a name for themselves or simply do not want to give up the data.