One of the big barriers to quality healthcare for many Americans is the fact that medical records are hard to access and often incomplete. The records also often take a long time to reach the caregiver possibly delaying treatment.

The DoD has been running a pilot program for the U.S. military that involves personal health records of active military personnel, their families, and veterans. The service is called MiCare and is currently in the pilot stage at the Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington.

The DoD currently plans to expand the service to a facility in the Hampton Roads, VA and ultimately to other facilities as well. Once implemented fully, the MiCare service will allow users to access their information via internet services including Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health. The DoD says that it went with the Microsoft and Google offerings as a cost and time saving measure.

Chuck Campbell, CIO of Military Health System said at a conference, "I could build all the servers, buy all the software to do that at probably a large cost and a long time, or I could do this."

Privacy is a big concern with the program and the DoD stresses that users have to opt into the program and healthcare records won’t go online unless the patient approves. The owner of the healthcare information will also be able to decide what information is ahead and whom it is shared with.

Among the concerns that had to be addressed during the pilot program were how to share the medical information from the military health systems with public systems from Google and Microsoft. Campbell says that special arrangements and penalties were made with Google and Microsoft concerning security.

Among the special arrangements were that the information on U.S. military personnel would only be stored within the U.S. and that the data would be deleted immediately from servers when users opted out of the system.