I've been following your blog for a few months now, and I have to say that I have found your posts very much on-the-money in regards to improving healthcare with technology / IT standards. I'm a resident physician at the University of Washington and I wanted to add another way that opening up health data can improve our system and lower costs. For generations, residents have wasted hours of their valuable training time on data-gathering. Even in this day and age of electronics and lab data that's available at the touch of a button, we are STILL spending hours a day doing things like, calling various departemnts in the hospital figuring out if X test has been done / if not, when it will be / when the results will arrive / finding out that peice of particular data is provided in an esoteric form that is only accessible by XYZ manuvers or that the fax has been lost. And that's just within your hospital. Good luck trying to track down records from an outside hospital, because even if they are faxed over appropriately, maybe it's 2 days later and the patient has changed floors in the hospital and now those records have gotten trashed.  And then if your patient requires a healthcare power of attorney to make decisions, hopefully their contact information is readily available or you've signed yourself for many times, cross country phone tag figuring out who to talk to. Or even just reading an EMR. I've worked with several popular EMRs, and while they are sophisticated, the clinical notes are just a pile of electronic files equivalent to a paper record and there is perhaps a 1:10 ratio of physician notes to other notes which you must wade through.

This is the reality of our physician training. And who pays for training residents?  Medicare. Which means taxpayers. The public is likely unaware that they are paying quite a few dollars for all physicians to first train as glorified secretaries.  

For me personally, that's what it means to liberate health data. Better patient care -- the Veterans Administration provides some great care for veterans because all their patients stay within the same system, same health data accessible from any VA -- and, better physician training.

I was wondering if your group / Microsoft is working with the University of Washington at all in developing health IT software or standards?