Permanente and Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a partnership that the two giant companies hope will push forward the effort to digitize medical records and safely transfer sensitive health data.

Kaiser's 156,000 employees will be eligible for a pilot program connecting the Oakland health maintenance organization's health records with Microsoft's HealthVault, a free, Web-based medical database the technology giant launched in October.

The slow shift of the American health industry from paper medical files to digitized records has been fraught with complications, a major one being that hospitals, medical groups and insurance companies typically have closed computer systems that do not allow for the exchange of information.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/09/BUD1114PTD.DTL

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