What better way to kick off this blog than write my first post about the launch of Google Health. Google’s vision is to aggregate personal health information in one place, or a service that lets you store your Personal Health Record online.
What’s great about Google Health is that it conforms to the CCR standard, which stands for Continuity of Care Record. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_of_Care_Record.
This standard is also used by Google’s biggest competitor, Microsoft’s Health Vault (http://www.healthvault.com), and assures that the data is stored and can be “computed” using a universal format.
The feature set of Google Health includes the ability to input your conditions and drugs, check multiple drugs for drug interactions, find a doctor based on your condition (this needs a little more work) and the ability to use third-party tools created by external developers.
It’s a little hard to enter all your condition into the system. To make the process easier, Google is partnering with several healthcare entities, which enable a user to import their health information from a third-party website automatically (https://www.google.com/health/directory?cat=importrecords).
Another one of Google Health’s exciting features, at least for me personally, is its list of health topics: https://www.google.com/health/ref/. For PeoplesMD, I’ve been researching a lot of “condition” information providers, and most of them struggle to find a good balance between accessibility of information and information overload. Google seems to have found a format that works really well, plus makes it available like no one else: through one page listing all the topic pages.
Big concerns about Google Health’s vision are privacy issues. In order for Google Health to grow, users need to have enough trust to store their most personal information online. Large parts of the discussion focus around Google Health’s exclusion from HIPPA. HIPPA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and was enacted by the US congress in 1996. Fred Trotter thinks it’s a good thing that services like Google Health are not covered by HIPAA, because our “ability to generate medical information has vastly outpaced our methods for handling that information”. Meaning the current ways of storing medical information and sharing them with all the different healthcare providers needs to be reworked (http://www.fredtrotter.com/2008/05/23/in-all-fairness/) In that respect, Google Health could actually be a useful tool that lets you control what parts of your medical data can be seen by different entities, just like Facebook lets you decide what part of your life is visible to different groups of people. Not everyone agrees with Fred. Nathan McFeters sees primarily the privacy risks of Google’s data storage: http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1166.
At the moment, Google is not making any money with Google Health (according to Marrisa Mayer at Google, http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/05/google-hea...). As the platform grows, it’ll be interesting to see if this situation continues. If people use Google Health to store online information, the urge to show targeted ads is big, considering the dollars pharma companies is willing to spend for targeted ads. On the plus side, the collective information stored on Google Health could provide great information for medical research, with the click of a button.
