If you think that "data portability" and standards for an open web hold a lot of promise to fuel innovation in social networking, just imagine what a secure, standards-based, data landscape could enable in health care.

The Continua Alliance, made up of companies like Nokia, Intel and Panasonic, along with IBM and Google, highlighted a handful of factors in the announcement. The technology will be useful in a wide variety of case types ("including chronic disease management, health and wellness, and elderly care"), in the US and around the world. By leveraging online services, the platform will enable healthcare providers to leverage scale in ways that otherwise isolated medical monitoring can not. And by putting the software into widespread use, the group hopes to make significant headway in supporting open standards and "interoperable healthcare products and solutions." That's on top of all the standard consumer benefits of online health records. (See coverage at Medgadget for more details and a link to the press release.) The companies don't yet have any name for the platform but say it's tested and ready to deploy.

The group also said that supporting the development of Google Health was one of its goals, but we hope that the technology will support the development of an entire ecosystem of complimentary, competing and interoperable health data services.

That kind of language is both similar to what advocates of social networking "data portability" use and represents the kind of steps we'd love to see more of from big vendors in all kinds of technology sectors.

Open, standardized data, backed up by certified security measures and serving as the foundation of a new era of innovation is a fantastic vision. If you think that big players in social networking have a financial interest in data lock-in, though, just imagine the resistance that "data portability" could face in the multi-trillion dollar medical industry.

The companies collaborating on this platform believe that consumer demand for informed care, combined with the vendor participation already gathered, will force the rest of the industry to open, down to every medical practitioner challenged by patients to use portable data in treatment. That seems like a sound strategy to us.

What is Holding People Back?

According to Erika S. Fishman, Manhattan Research's Director of Research, besides privacy concerns, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome for the adoption of PHR is a lack of motivation among Americans to use these records unless faced with live threatening illnesses.

Meredith Abreu Ress, Manhattan Research's VP of Research, also doesn't expect to see PHRs to take off this year. As she points out, its hard to see what would motivate patients to curate their own health records when most doctors still have "your entire medical history in a coffee-stained manila folder."

Obama: Electronic Health Records for All Americans

As Greg Sterling pointed out over a year ago, the success of PHRs will be "tied in to the political outcome of universal healthcare initiatives." President-elect Obama has made electronic health records a cornerstone of his administration's proposed health policy, but some groups are already voicing concerns about the privacy implications of creating electronic medical records for all American.

According to CNN, in American, only about 8% of hospitals and 17% of physicians keep electronic records of the kind that Obama envisions and that President Bush also proposed in 2006. The administration hopes to make all medical records available in electronic form by 2014.

CC-licensed Image of 'health card' courtesy of Flickr user juhansonin.