Google Offers Personal Health Records on the Web
May 21, 2008 | General
The Internet search giant’s service, Google Health, at www.google.com/health, is the latest entrant in the growing field of companies offering personal health records on the Web. Their ranks range from longtime online health services like WebMD to the software powerhouse Microsoft to start-ups like Revolution Health.
The companies all hope to capitalize eventually on the trend of increasingly seeking health information online, and the potential of Internet tools to help consumers manage their own health care and medical spending.
Google enters the field of personal health records with a leading online brand, deep pockets and a wealth of technical skills. In a two-month trial this year, the Cleveland Clinic found that its patients were eager to use the Google health records.
The pilot project, limited to 1,600 patients, was quickly oversubscribed, said C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer. Dr. Harris also said that when the clinic’s online health records, introduced in 2004, were linked to the Google record the clinic’s records were used more frequently by patients. “It positioned our personal health record more into an activity that they use every day,” Dr. Harris said.
The Google record, he said, allows the user to send personal information, at the individual’s discretion, into the clinic record or to pull information from the clinic records into the Google personal file.
The ability of patients to send information, in particular, can be helpful to clinic doctors, Dr. Harris said. For example, if a person sees specialists outside the clinic and receives a drug prescription from an outside doctor, it raises the risk of harmful drug interactions. “Until now, if a patient doesn’t remember to tell me,” he said, “I don’t know about drugs prescribed outside the Cleveland Clinic system.”
In the Cleveland trial, patients apparently did not shun the Google health records because of qualms that their personal health information might not be secure if held by a large technology company.
In Google Health, as in the pilot project, the company is not selling advertisements. And what information is shared with doctors, clinics or pharmacies is controlled by the individual, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products.
More than two dozen companies and institutions announced that they are partners with Google Health, including Walgreens, CVS, the American Heart Association, Quest Diagnostics, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic. The partnerships are not exclusive arrangements.
Cleveland Clinic, for example, is also talking to Microsoft. “As these online services become available, we expect to connect to them all,” Dr. Harris said.
Google Health, Ms. Mayer said, represents a “large ongoing initiative” by the company, which she said she hoped would eventually include “thousands of partners and millions of users.”
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Comment by Nat May 23, 2008
The need of the hour is not Personal Health Records (PHR). If the healthcare system is efficient, PHR will make it more efficient.
I don’t understand how people can “manage their own health care and medical spending” when cost is not transparent at all. Currently doctors simply HATE to deal with anybody/anything other than patients as they are thoroughly frustrated with dealing with horrible health-plans.
What is the point in wasting time in the so called PHR now. If it needs to succeed, we need to have at least a single-payer system or open market where people deal with cost/payment directly.
The least what we can do right now is to make cost transparent. Get a legislation passed; it does not require any funding.
Nat
Comment by Liz May 23, 2008
I agree with Nat. Our healthcare system is in 18th century; we talk about 22nd century in the form of PHR!!
Let’s bring the system current. Make healthcare available for all. Then we can think of PHR.
Liz
Comment by Mike May 24, 2008
Folks, people are losing jobs besides health insurance. If you (or your dependent) fall sick, you lose your job, and insurance of course.
People talk about personal health records, etc without understanding the fundamental problem in the current system.
Today, PEOPLE do not buy healthcare. The system does not need them to buy; even if they want to buy, the cost is simply unknown. Unless people are made to buy healthcare, the cost can never be brought down.
I don’t understand how PHR will reduce healthcare cost.
Mike
Comment by Tom May 26, 2008
People who have good coverage (if any) do not care about the cost of medical care they need.
And those who are uninsured also do not care about the cost as they generally end up in ER.
Even if you want to pay directly, the cost is unknown before you avail; as a result you have no way of buying the service you need.
It means the current system can not and will not work. Trash it.
There are only two options:
A) Provide universal healthcare managed/controlled by the Govt..just like k-12 education.
OR
B) Make it just like Auto-insurance as some one suggested earlier. Make the cost transparent and people will buy the services as required; and have insurance only for catastrophic events like cancer, etc. Use HSAs for the purpose.
There is no other option to fix healthcare. Wake up folks! Per capita medical cost would be $13,000/- in 2016 in the current system.
Act now!! Call your elected representatives right now.
Tom
Comment by PJ May 27, 2008
I agree with Tom. Either Govt or the people should take control of healthcare. Cost can not be controlled by third parties like health plans; what interest they have to control cost, what they want is profit.
$13,000 per person per year of healthcare cost is simply unthinkable.
Stop talking, act NOW, before millions of people die early because of this mess. Imagine our GDP/productivity in the competitive global economy with our aging population; our GDP will be seriously impacted by this healthcare mess.
As Tom said, make healthcare like a K-12 education or auto-insurance. Both are working reasonably well.
Right now, people are losing jobs if they (or dependents) fall seriously ill. What else do we need to trash the healthcare system. Employers can not provide health insurance anymore and remain competitive in the global economy.
PJ