The Microsoft Health Vault is a service which allows anyone to upload all their medical records to a secure Microsoft website. It should be good for you and your doctor as your medical history can now be accessed from any web-based computer. The more details a doctor or consultant has on your health, the better, right?

However I see the health vault as the start of the end of the control that doctors and consultants have over our health and our wallets. If anyone we specify can access our records, it means we can consult anyone about our health, providing them with the same information our local doctor and consultants have.

With technologies such as video conferencing and internet-enabled diagnostic machinery, the Microsoft Health Vault and the Google alternative (if Google ever manages to launch it) will mean a new wave of medical tourism without having to travel.

For non-invasive medical treatments, do we need to physically meet with a consultant? Why spend 800 on an Irish consultant when a specialist in India will charge 100? She too will have all your blood test results and x-rays at hand.

Maybe in time we'll see 'Microsoft Certified Medical Consultants' the same way we have Microsoft Certified Technology Professionals these days?

The global healthcare industry is worth close to $2 trillion annually. In Ireland healthcare is in the news almost daily with talk of cutbacks due to exploding costs and shrinking budgets. My advice to health minister Mary Harney (I hear she loves this column) is to digitise all medical records, start using Microsoft or Google or IBM medical record solutions and buy truckloads of diagnostic machinery that can connect to medical centres across the world via the internet.

Don't hire new consultants, outsource their work to cheaper countries which actually seem to have better healthcare systems than us already. If technology can make a health system just 1% more efficient while the technology providers take a small percentage of that small percentage, then countries can save billions every year while tech companies can vastly increase revenue in this emerging market.

There are of course issues with trust and security when it comes to medical records.

We might trust Microsoft with our email but could we afford it the same degree of trust that we give our GP? Our GP will maintain our medical privacy and our records are locked away in cabinets or safes. We do not know where the electronic versions of our records are, and if they are ever compromised, anyone in the world could potentially read our most intimate medical details.

There are also unanswered questions about getting all that electronic data back out if we want to move it somewhere else.

Microsoft wants to be the sole gatekeeper of such valuable data and it looks as if healthcare providers will have to pay an entrance tax in the guise of using special Microsoft software to access and amend the data. Many will see this as fair since health vault is free to us, the patients.

This Microsoft health application is important, not just for the service it offers but for letting us, the consumers, know that our medical data is now worth money.

We should exercise our power over this data and tell Microsoft or Google or IBM that we insist on being able to move our data freely about, in the same way we can easily move our money from one bank to another and, just like a bank, get money for keeping our data with that provider.