Drumroll, Please: Google Health Launches!
Posted by Sarah Rubenstein
May 19, 2008, 5:19 pm
The curtain in front of Google Health finally came up today.
google.com
On a tour, Google explains that, yes, this is another “personal health record,” a way for patients to store and manage their medical information in one place. But Google seems to be trying to address one of the big problems with PHRs: maintaining them is a big pain.
“Of course you don’t want to type in your entire medical history yourself,” says Google, playing the soothing therapist. So the company has developed partnerships with a handful of health-care entities to lend a hand. For instance Walgreen said it would help patients access their pharmacy records through Google Health, and CVS Caremark said patients would be able to get to their prescription records as well as summaries from their visits to MinuteClinic. Lab-test company Quest Diagnostics is also participating, as are pharmacy-benefits giant Medco, the Cleveland Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, according to this list of partners. The group isn’t huge, but it’s a step.
The biggest hurdle of all may be that only 14% of medical practices keep records electronically, the WSJ noted earlier this year. The real moment for these services isn’t likely to come until larger numbers of docs finally shift to electronic records that can easily be transferred to personal health records.
WSJ’s Google reporter Jessica Vascellaro sent us a dispatch: “Google’s vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said the company is very conscious of the sensitivity of the information it is collecting and has taken a range of steps — including beefed up security of the servers where records are stored — to protect it. Consumers must also select which participating medical organizations can read and send updates to their profile and can tailor the permissions for different providers.”
Still, some worrywarts have pointed out that Google and Microsoft, which offers something called HealthVault, won’t be subject to the strictures of the federal health privacy law known as HIPAA.
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