What's in Health Vault? Search Me.

After Microsoft walked away from the Yahoo deal its strategy for beating Google was paraphrased this week in Business Week as "search advertising is overrated." But in its competitive race against Google Health in the emerging personal health records business, search is everything.

It is ironic that personal health record information, some of the most privacy-sensitive data, is seen as the latest battleground in the search wars.

At first blush, Microsoft's Health Vault appears to be simply an effort to help consumers create personal copies of their electronic medical records. Google has a competing product, still under wraps, called Google Health. But if you thought Health Vault was a personal health record storage service, a way to aggregate all of your health data records in one place, you'd be wrong.

Grad Conn describes Health Vault, launched last year, as a “database with a set of APIs.” It is a “virtual integrated delivery network,” a development platform on which he says business partners can build e-health applications. “We see this as a way to get hundreds of guys to build applications on our [platform],” he says.

“Health Vault is less about storage and more about sharing. It is an integrated system where all the data flows,” he says. For example, one partner is building a PC-connected blood pressure monitor and a Health Vault-enabled blood pressure management application that stores that information in the Health Vault network. The user can then opt to share that data with his doctor or other parties. Like Health Vault, Google Health is about being the platform, or "ecosystem" for personal health record applications.

But Microsoft, Conn says, plans to make money off of syndication of its Live Search technology, which it hopes will be embedded in all Health Vault applications. “Search is not that deeply built into most health ecosystems today,” he says. So Microsoft wants developers to build on its Health Vault platform – and build Live Search into their applications. “This is a vertical search extension strategy. It gives an application like MSN Messenger a host of applications that didn’t exist before,” says Conn.