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21 Feb 2008

Google personal health records plan takes shape

The Google personal health record project starts off with a collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, we learn today from something called Webware.

Between 1,500 and 10,000 patients at the Cleveland, Ohio, facility will participate in the project’s test run, volunteering to have their medical records transferred to their Google accounts. The hospital already keeps electronic records for over 100,000 patients in an internal system called MyChart, but when those personal health records, or PHRs, are shared with Google, patients will be able to use them outside of the Cleveland Clinic. Included in the data will be prescription information, medical histories, and details about conditions and allergies.

“Patients are more proactively managing their own healthcare information,” Dr. C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer, said in a statement. “At Cleveland Clinic, we strive to participate in and help to advance the national dialogue around a more efficient and effective national healthcare system.”

“We believe patients should be able to easily access and manage their own health information,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search projects and user experience, said in the same statement.

I saw a MyChart presentation, and I think this will be a whole load better.

Webware also points to other initiatives and explores the privacy concerns

Google isn’t the only tech titan looking to change the healthcare industry. AOL founder Steve Case has launched a new company, Revolution Health; InterActiveCorp has invested in several health-related start-ups; and Microsoft has been working on a medical record service.

But all these “health 2.0” initiatives will inevitably raise privacy concerns, and critics of such projects have already begun to make themselves heard. The World Privacy Forum, which has highlighted concerns about medical identity theft in the past, has already issued a report voicing concerns about third-party PHR systems that aren’t covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which has been in effect since 1996 and requires individuals to be notified when a party other than a patient’s doctor wants to access confidential medical data.

Not only is security an issue, the nonprofit has said, so is the likelilhood that marketers and other corporate entities will be able to exploit otherwise confidential data. The World Privacy Forum has not taken a specific stance on Google’s new project or on others like Microsoft’s.

It’s coming to something, you might think, when the world takes lectures on the best way to store medical records from a leviathan tech company that’s barely out of its nappies, But, weirder still when such a company takes a more sensible approach, and explains it more straighforwardly, and charges us less for it that our own government does.

The PHR advocates make complete sense to me, and make nonsense of our overpriced and meandering Connecting for Health programme. And if there are any cost overruns (or indeed weird unaccounted-for expense claims) it’s their problem, not the generally law-abiding UK taxpayer’s. 

Similar story in the Reg (26 minutes ago - they can’t have had such a big dinner as me); Infoworld etc.

• Posted by William Heath on 21/02/08 at 11:02pm
• Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust · Save Time and Money · "Transformational Government"
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