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Google Health Now Live: Could Become a Powerful Portal for Third Parties

We’re nearly halfway through the year, and Google Health has launched nearly on schedule. The highly anticipated health tool is now live and accessible to all Google users. There are four basic categories to utilize: Your personal Health profile, Importing of medical records, Exploring online health services, and Doctor search.

The information you provide under your health records is used for your own personal purposes, and can be printed and taken with you to a doctor’s appointment. If an office is integrated with Google health, then the information is already accessible to them In terms of the extended health services provided through Google’s health portal, registering for any of these, and linking it to your Google health profile provides you with automated updates to that third party service.

The doctor search is quite similar to what you’ll find through a regular Google search, except this is a specialized search tool. There are no filtering options, however, so going through a page of results can b a cumbersome task. Once you find a doctor you like, however, they can be linked to your Google Health profile as well.

With the current offering, the most powerful aspect of Google Health is likely its consumer-facing portal, which a number of third-party services will be interested in having a spot. This appears to be more integrated with third parties than Microsoft’s HealthVault. Even though Google is explicitly not in partnership with these third party services, having a select number of these services is almost acting as a recommendation to the end user.

As there are only a handful of services that can be connected to your Google Health profile, including ePillBox and Walgreen’s Pharmacy, the potential for increased user base and added value of integration with Google Health makes it a potentially covted place for which third-party services are accessed.

Google Launches Health Service

http://mediabullseye.com/mb/2008/05/google-launches-health-service.html

Following months of hype and speculation, Google has launched a new service for archiving health records and seeking medical assistance. Google Health will help users build personal health profiles centered on their own medical records, and then locate doctors and online resources. The information can then be accessed by registered hospitals and pharmacies with a patient’s permission.

While many onlookers are impressed with the extent of Google’s new service, convincing the general public to sign up for such a service is expected to be a difficult and slow process.   Google hopes to ease user concerns by insisting that they will maintain complete control over their records.

HIPAA Revisited: Privacy vs. Portability
Responding to heightened concerns about the privacy of individuals'
medical and healthcare information, the federal government in 1996
introduced HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act, empowering the Department of Health and Human Services to develop
and manage the methods governing the collection and sharing of personal
health information.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/63119.html

Google Health Unveiled: Open the Flood Gates

Seekingalpha.com

Douglas Cress

http://www.onemedplace.com/blog/

After 18 months in development, Google (GOOG) has unveiled its online personal health record [PHR] storage system, Google Health.

Google brings its considerable know how and infrastructure to the space. The successful trial at the Cleveland Clinic validated the secure exchange of patient data between the Clinic and a secure Google profile.

The excitement was palpable. According to C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer, the trial, limited to 1,600 patients, was quickly overbooked.

Privacy Concerns Over-Hyped

Google’s approach bypasses the key problem in being able to integrate health data from multiple sources. Current regulations, designed to protect people’s privacy, make sharing medical data difficult. But Google places control in the hands of the user. If the user inputs data and then shares access with to this data with others, privacy issues are largely averted.

Your Google Health profile includes standard PHR data like notices, drug interactions, conditions, medications, allergies, procedures, immunization and test results. Google places your data in the clouds; it’s accessible with the same password you may use for email and other Google services – if this password is compromised your records are at risk.

I spoke with Dr. Leonard Finn this weekend, who reports his existing PHR system is both cumbersome and inefficient. The savings he envisioned when switching over to an electronic health record system were never realized. Currently Finn stores his data on a server in his office, a decision he believes will curtail the risk of privacy violations.

Finn looks forward to learning more about Google Health; if anyone can make data safe it’s Google. A public relations nightmare would ensnare the company if even a modest breach of privacy were to occur.

Robust System Architecture

Google Health offers a number of tools including a ‘health topics’ section which allows users to find information (symptoms, causes, treatment, news, etc.) in a robust library of disease states. This would seem to run on a collision course with WebMD (WBMD). Users can search for physicians in a number of ways.

The secret sauce is the ability to add or import your patient records and prescription data. Google has established data portability relationships with:

• Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: Patient site connects patients to medical records online.
• Cleveland Clinic MyChart: Online health management tool that gives Cleveland Clinic patients access to their medical records.
• Longs Drug Stores: Import prescription history from Longs.com.
• Walgreens Pharmacy: Import prescription history from Walgreens.com.
• Medco: Online pharmacy management and mail order drugs.
• RxAmerica: Discounts on prescriptions at retail pharmacies and delivery through a mail order prescription program.
• MinuteClinic: Retail-based health care and a subsidiary of CVS (CVS) Caremark; medical care for common illnesses.
• Quest Diagnostics (DGX): Laboratory testing, information, and services; access lab test results online.

Monetization Opportunities Abound

Monetization opportunities abound. While the site remains ad-free, Google is in a unique position to offer the services gratis until it gains significant market share.

Down the road, I believe Google will support the service through advertising. Think GMAIL for medicine – with ads for doctors, pharmacies, drugs, and devices peppered beside your personal health records and delivered using the same contextual advertising Google is known for.

Google Offers Personal Health Records on the Web

By STEVE LOHR

Published: May 20, 2008
NYTimes.com

After a year and half of development, Google began offering online personal health records to the public on

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.”

Are Personalized Mobile Ads Evil? GigOm.com As the mobile browsing experience forces people to search on smaller screens, where will Google place all of its revenue-generating text ads? Ben Kunz in BusinessWeek writes that the rise in mobile browsing on small screens equates to less ad space for Google. I doubt very much it will mean the end of Google’s revenue stream, however. Mobile ads are both scarce and effective and as such, will only prompt Google to attach to them a luxury model. Though such luxury will have to mean more personalization — in other words, as Kunz suggests, more intense profiling and more personalized ads. Given its forays into storing medical data and its ability to search your desktop, I don’t think Google can afford to get too personal with its advertising without risking considerable backlash. But it continues to walk the line between utility and privacy without damaging either its brand or its ability to make money, so maybe Google will find a way.

Warning on Storage of Health Records

 

By STEVE LOHR

NYTimes.com click here for more...

 

In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records.

The authors, Dr. Kenneth D. Mandl and Dr. Isaac S. Kohane, are longtime proponents of the benefits of electronic patient records to improve care and help individuals make smarter health decisions.

But their concern, stated in the article published Wednesday and in an interview, is that the medical profession and policy makers have not begun to grapple with the implications of companies like Microsoft and Google becoming the hosts for vast stores of patient information.

Making the Case for Uploading Personal Medical Data

As technologically advanced as we are in the U.S., we are still in the
horse-and-buggy age when it comes to our medical records. A person's
records are usually dispersed among a number of healthcare providers,
including primary care physicians, specialists, hospitals, emergency
rooms, labs, pharmacies and therapists. This system is inefficiently
fragmented and also dangerous for the patient.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/62437.html

Microsoft's Future of Healthcare

http://jburg.typepad.com/future/2008/03/the-future-of-m.html

Jon Burg's Future Vision

So apparently the future is all about semi-transparent screens, adaptive interfaces, more screens, self-aware technologies, more screens, oddly shaped houses, more screens, and yes, utility oriented technology (and more screens!). 

Oh yeah, and in the future... we won't want any real buttons or signs, all we'll care about is opacity in our devices.  Tactile interfaces are so last century.  Isn't that why we all gave up on cash and coins in the 80s, in favor of credit cards, and gave up credit cards 5 years ago in favor of RFID keyfobs?

But seriously, when future casting, can we please bring a little bit of realism to the table?

Healthline Partners With Aetna For Personalized Medical Portal

techcrunch.com

While Microsoft and Google want to build general health portals for consumers (Microsoft launched HealthVault, and we’re still waiting for Google Health), medical search engine Healthline is taking more of a white-label approach. It is partnering with Aetna to create a personalized health portal for insurance customers called Aetna SmartSource.

Since Aetna already has electronic medical records for the people it insures, SmartSource can offer personalized results for health-related searches. These include health information about a person’s specific conditions and maladies, their medications, local doctors who treat those diseases, and medical costs. Healthline’s medical taxonomy matches common health terms with their technical medical counterparts to provide a guided search experience. For each search, it provides a visual map showing all the related categories, covering diseases, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

By tying into all the data that Aetna already collects about the people it insures, Healthline is sidestepping one of the big hurdles that HealthVault and Google Health face. Namely, getting personal medical information into their systems. But it is a very insurance-centric view of a person’s health. (There is a lot of emphasis on showing healthcare costs, even though that rarely factors into the medical decisions of most people who are covered by insurance).

Google’s and Microsoft’s approach draws on many more sources of medical information and is designed to help people monitor and track their own health. For instance, they let you upload data from medical monitoring devices such as glucose or blood pressure meters so you can keep track of your progress over time. The Aetna-Healthline portal takes a much more top-down approach. If it is not a billable health event, SmartSource won’t capture it. That part is not so smart.

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