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A couple of new domains appeared last week on Microsoft's nameservers, both containing the HealthVault name and registered for com/net/org. As our pals at Resource Shelf picked up on their weekly roundup of the happenings on the Microsoft, as well as Google, nameservers, Microsoft has something up its voluminous sleeves regarding HealthVault.

Microsoft launched HealthVault in early October 2007. It offers a central destination for personal health details and a repository of health information where people can search for more data on ailments, symptoms, and treatments.

Now the company has registered healthvault-int and healthvault-ppe, each to the com, net, and org domains. We can only speculate on what int and ppe mean in the context of health, which we'll try to do now.

INT frequently means 'internal', though it could stand for 'internist', which is a name for internal medicine specialists who deal with chronic and acute diseases, according to HowStuffWorks. Conditions that merit an internist's attention, like hypertension and diabetes, likely draw lots of web searches from people who have those ailments.

PPE poses more of a challenge. Primary physician or provider come to mind as possibilities, especially since one can find that concept in HMOs already. Several definitions for PPE exist already, most notably Personal Protective Equipment. Wikipedia suggested other options, none of which look directly related to healthcare.

That one is a stickler, which means we'll have to wait for the official word from Microsoft on its meaning, unless one of our readers can enlighten us in the comment section below. Maybe its meaning will be more clear after Google launches its Health portal sometime next year, should they use similar terms.