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Google Gets It: Personal Health Information is Really Complex

I give Adam a lot of credit for this posting:

  • He acknowledges that health care is really complicated
  • He understands the dangers — that providing less than perfect information has the possibility of causing harm
  • He doesn’t claim to have all the answers
  • He asks for input

Many have been speculating about Google’s entry into health care. Read Jeff O’Connor’s blog posting and follow the links.

Adam previously described the notion of a “health URL”

an online meeting place where their caregivers — with express permission from the ill person — can come together, pass on notes to each other, review each other’s notes, look at the medical data, and suggest courses of action. This isn’t rocket science. It is online web applications 101.

Unlike a typical personal health record (PHR), the idea here is that the health URL would be completely controlled by the patient — not tethered to a physician, a health plan, an employer or anybody else.

I have come to believe that the Personal Health Record will be an exceptionally powerful tool. My “aha moment” came a few months ago when I started to think about PHRs as a platform, not just an application. If you ponder the “PHR as platform” concept for a moment, you might see that virtually any other eHealth application could plug in to a PHR platform — remote patient monitoring, secure patient messaging, electronic health records (EHRs), patient reminder systems, mobile technologies — the possibilites are pretty endless. Does this make sense? …more later….

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to republish this post with attribution.

3 Comments

  1. […] Vince Kuraitis goes further and tackles the complexity of Personal Health Records and Google. […]



  2. Dan Cramer on August 7, 2007 at 12:12 pm

    It seems the recent trends of pulling down the ‘walled gardens’ could also be applied to the PHR. Just as you can create widgets with your latest photos, so too could you create a widget to track your weight and plug it into the health record.



  3. SLanier on May 12, 2008 at 7:40 am

    Google is used by millions of people and since a lot of us are in need of health insurance and access to physicians in our area, I think it would be a great idea to have this information available to us through search engines such as Google. I believe if everything is done accurately, less people would die or become extremely ill because they will be able to get to the right doctor who will provide the right health care in time to prevent an untimely demise. Health care in America is already difficult to come by, so this would definitely make living a healthy life a lot easier.