The other night I got a call from a friend -- could I come and stay with him while he waited in an emergency room, he'd been in a minor car accident.  I did. Over the course of the next six hours that we were at the hospital, my friend, a gay man in his 40s, and I discussed how handy it would be if he had access to his medical records, so that he could simply give his attending physician this information, or somehow grant access to his medical records from another hospital to the in-take person at the emergency room. Not only would it be time-saving, but when you're in the middle of a medical emergency, having a clear-headed accounting of all of your personal medical history is a lot to ask.

It's an idea whose time has arrived, fortunately, as we are a lot closer to this "access-anywhere" via several initiatives. But the journey to this goal offers more than one road that seem to parallel each other but don't quite intersect.

You may have heard that Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit health maintenance organization, has signed onto a partnership with Microsoft, to start using its personal health record (called PHR) service, HealthVault.

The concept is hardly new to Kaiser, though, who for years has given all of its member/patients online access to their files. But HealthVault expands that offering dramatically in many useful ways.

For instance, Microsoft has assembled a list of companies that make health-related products (glucometers, blood pressure monitors) or offer services (software that pulls in data from labs, hospitals, etc.) compatible with HealthVault. Use one of them, and data from the lab or your home blood pressure cuff automatically gets sucked into your HealthVault PHR. If you aren't using one of these products or services, though, the only way to create your record now is for you to upload an existing document -- like a new page of blood work results, say -- from your computer.  You may well ask: who wants to do that?

Central to HealthVault's conceit, though, is that it lets you store your information in one central place on the Web. The consumer is in control of what information is stored and can decide who else can see, change, or help manage it. HealthVault never lets other Web sites or programs see or change the information in your HealthVault record without explicit permission from you or a record custodian invited to share your records.

The Kaiser-Microsoft partnership will start as a pilot program with about 150,000 of Kaiser's employees; if that's successful, HealthVault will be offered to 8.7 million Kaiser members.

But there's another formidable player prepared to do the very same thing the software giant -- Google.

Google Health is focusing more, at least initially, on the consumer side, by trying to get consumers to manually load their own medical information into their profiles. This is something some people will like; others will find it arduous and unnecessarily burdensome. 

The beauty of having records automatically pulled into your PHR, however, isn't lost on Google Health. Partners include the Cleveland Clinic, and Beth Isreal Deaconness Medical Center (have an Xray or use a pedometer and that information will get loaded into your PHR); drugstores (Medco, Walgreens, RXAmerica, and Longs Drug Stores); and Quest Diagnostics (for lab tests), and MinuteClinic from CVS Caremark.

Also on the upside, Google Health lets you link your profile to a number of other online health services. These include ePillBox.info (medication scheduler), a heart attack risk calculator, iHealth, Livestrong.com, MyDailyApple (daily health news), MyMedicalRecords,com, and NoMoreClipboard.

The ability to share your profile with as many services as possible would seem to be extremely useful. You'll be able to grant different levels of permission to each service.

Privacy concerns abound. While the value of having instant access to our records has many obvious benefits, any medical information stored online makes most people, rightfully, uneasy.

According to a New York Times article on Kaiser's decision to go with Microsoft's product, one of the decisions was based on Microsoft’s technology for protecting the privacy and security of personal data, which the hospital rep described as impressive.  A quick perusal on the Internet will turn up as many detractors to their technology as fans.  Google has historically given great weight to privacy concerns, but one always worries about breaches in security.

Ultimately, will the benefits of having a PHR outweigh the liabilities and privacy concerns?  The answer may be different for everyone reading these words.

Who will win in the quest to maintain our health records? There are a few smaller players, like Revolution Health and Aetna's SmartSource. But in the end, the winner, hopefully, will be the consumer.  So far, if you prefer say, HealthVault over Google Health, you might find yourself in a bit of a quandry: the companies use different format's for storing our PHRs. Google uses something called Continuity of Care Record or CCR; Microsoft uses a Continuity of Care Document, called a CCD. While both companies say they plan to support both formats, that isn't the case just yet.

Will that mean it would be prudent for consumers to have two sets of records, with HealthVault and Google Health and maybe others?  That sounds like a lot of work most people would be reluctant to invest.

In a sign of the times, Apple's Steve Jobs on Monday announced the next generation iPhone. Mixed in with the hoopla, Jobs demonstrated a handful of exciting software applications designed for the Internet uber-phone -- two of them included health and medical apps.