Google Health
May 20, 2009
A battle is shaping up among some heavy hitters for digital health services. If you want a useful summary of what Googzilla has been doing, you can click here to read Mark Gibbs’s overview of the service. For me the most interesting comment was:
Google Health provides an API based on a subset of the “Continuity of Care Record” API described as “a standard format for transferring snapshots of a patient’s medical history.” This API allows developers to build software that can create and read consumer’s medical records with sophisticated authorization and access controls.
Not much about search and data mining in the story, however. Keep in mind that Google products and services have search baked in. Google seems to be pursuing a consumer strategy whilst Microsoft is chasing the health enterprise. Lots of exciting coming in this sector. Health information is in the same sorry state as the US health care system. My thought is that it will evolve along the same lines as the US auto and airline industry. That’s a comforting notion, isn’t it?
Stephen Arnold, May 20, 2009
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2 Responses to “Google Health”
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Ouch! I hope there aren’t any aspects of healthcare that end up in the same terrible place as the auto or airline industries.,..
I’ve used MS HealthVault for several months now, and I think it’s pretty cool from my perspective as a consumer. As you say, there’s a lot of infrastructure left to build, but I like what I’ve seen so far. The privacy policy is much better than I would have expected, and my doctor is totally cool with it (I do live in Seattle, though, so it may take a while for folks elsewhere to convince their docs to tech up). I’m looking forward to seeing where it all goes, and I think I’m maybe optimistic.
I have to say I’m with Rob on this one. I checked out both Google Health and MS HealthVault, and I am using HealthVault. It has more apps built in and MS allows anyone to build an app to go with it, so there may be a lot of interesting options as time progresses. As more docs get online, pun intended, I think that it has the possibility to improve the healthcare industry. I am a bit concerned about privacy, but then again, my doc’s file cabinet full of coffee-stained manila folders isn’t exactly vault-protected.