the age of Health Portals

The Cleveland Clinic has launched Cleveland Clinic Health, a medical portal for consumers.  Sort of a branded WebMd...  and similar in concept and execution to Mayo's MayoClinic.com.  All of these sites target people who are increasingly taking health care into their own hands, bypassing or augmenting their primary care physician.  The days when you went to "your doctor" whenever you had something wrong and s/he told you what to do next are going, if they haven't gone already.

Microsoft's Health Vault is designed to provide tools for these sorts of sites, which will become increasingly "deeper" as they build out from providing generic information to storing specific information.  (Microsoft is studying how to incorporate imaging into Health Vault, for example.)

This trend is going to reinforce Electronic Health Record systems used by physicians and labs to communicate with each other; patients are increasingly becoming an important third constituency for these systems.  And of course the ARRA is providing a lot of funding to boost adoption of EHR.

It is hard to see where it is all going - I guess it is going in several directions at once - but it is clear that more electronic records online means more demand for digitizing health information, and more value delivered by digital pathology.