Microsoft and Longs Drug Team Up on Big Web Project

When Microsoft challenged Google for supremacy in the market to provide people with the capacity to maintain their own personalized, web-based medical records, it scored a big coup when Oakland’s Kaiser Permanente agreed to partner with them. Now, it looks like the software giant has snagged another East Bay partner. Longs Drug Stores has agreed to a partnership in which its pharmacy patients can now access their medical records through Microsoft’s HealthVault network. So, to recap: in the East Bay, pharmacies are entering the next phase in the 21st century. Elsewhere in the country, pharmacies are invoking Bronze Age religions to refuse to sell birth control. Sometimes we need to remember what’s so right about the East Bay.