Doctor Google, Emergency
October 20, 2010
I don’t know much, if anything, about the fancy electronic medical information world. I do know that when I go for my annual check up at the veterinarian, I get a big folder stuffed with documents. I think this goose’s medical file is going to need wheels in 2011.
I think my doc is pretty typical of most medical professionals in rural Kentucky. There are computers for scheduling and billing. We can’t overlook billing. But the notion of moving decades of data to a cloud service seems to be far in the future. My hunch is that the US government wants that future to arrive quickly, maybe in the next two or three years. However, there is the problem of money or the lack of it.
“What If Google Stored All Our Medical Records?” caught my attention. The article runs down some of the problems with the brave new world of digital instances of medical information. If you care about health data and have an interest in Google, you may find the write up suggesting that the Google may not be the ideal place to park the data. The article then references Facebook. Now that’s a place to store medical information.
I think I agree with Monday Note. We have a problem, but right now there seems to be no easy solution.
This goose’s view is that one must not overlook Microsoft. That’s another outfit that has ideas about cracking the digital medical information code. Out of sight and out of mind are some companies that avoid publicity as they stand in the river of medical information flowing around the US of A.
I like this write up, and it raises some interesting questions, including:
- What companies are in a position to deal with digital health information?
- What is the US government doing to manage these data?
- How can US citizens access their medical information in the event a doc’s office stuffed with paper burns in a weekend conflagration?
- Who will control cloud utilities’ use of medical information?
I don’t have any answers, but I still have that big folder when I hit the veterinarian’s office.
Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2010
Freebie unlike health care
Comments
2 Responses to “Doctor Google, Emergency”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
Making the paper-to-digital transition is a good thing. There is still the challenge of keeping data safe and confidential, for that Google is the worst possible solution. The best solution is probably to house data on internal network servers and using good enterprise search software to retrieve data.
[…] at Beyond Search, Stephen Arnold breaks the problem down into very interesting […]