Mayo Clinic and Microsoft are today launching a combined product called the Mayo Clinic Health Manager (and they’ll be showing it Thursday 23rd at the Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference). What this product does is essentially combine the care guidelines and rules that Mayo has developed over the years with an individual’s data in their HealthVault account to trigger recommendations about care.

This might be a series of simple recommendations that someone of a particular age and race should get a particular diagnostic test (e.g. mammograms for women over 50). But the program can go suck up data from Microsoft Healthvault, so that includes device data that, say, a diabetic might have in that system. Which means that much more complicated guidelines and prompts can be delivered to patients based on exactly what’s known about their current status. The first ones include pediatric wellness (immunizations to you!), pregnancy and asthma, with diabetes coming soon.

So at the moment it’s a management tool for patients, with the stamp of America’s best known health care brand on it. However, it also allows the patient to prepare for a physician visit.

It doesn’t take too much of an imaginative stretch to expect that soon, instead of preparing for an office visit with your local doctor, Mayo will be offering online and offline services for which this might become a front end. So if you can have Mayo guidelines and best practices anywhere using this tool, why wouldn’t you want Mayo services too? OK, so Mayo and Microsoft aren’t saying this now and maybe they aren’t thinking it. But if I’m a local health services provider knowing that I provide services that aren’t up to Mayo’s quality at probably more than Mayo’s prices, this would start to concentrate my mind a little.

This blog originally appeared at The Health Care Blog.

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