Google Health is here — or is it?

Venture Beat — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:55:28 -0500

Well, the WSJ says so in this somewhat breathless report that states Google will announce its long-awaited personal health-record service today.

My first thought was that the announcement was timed to get Google on the record in advance of the Health2.0 “Spring Fling” conference in San Diego next week, which will feature lots of talk about the role of the Internet in improving healthcare. Another possibility is that Google is pulling a bait-and-switch similar to that of Navigenics, which last November “announced” its personal-genomics service but held off launching it until — well, until not yet.

Yet a third possibility — and the most likely one to me — is that, as this Cnet article states, Google CEO will merely “preview” Google Health at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, supposedly the largest healthcare IT meeting in the world. Whatever it is, don’t hold your breath; the WSJ itself states that “[i]t wasn’t clear when the Google service for creating personal health records will begin to be available for consumers to access.”

In fact, the WSJ article doesn’t actually describe Google Health in any sort of detail, and instead devotes much of its space to pointing out the major challenges facing personal health records, many of which will sound familiar to regular readers here. In no particular order, these include:

Limited adoption of electronic medical-record systems. Only 14 percent of U.S. medical practices even use digital records, which will complicate the process of moving medical information to the Google system.
Incompatible electronic medical-record systems at hospitals and doctors’ offices. Because existing digital-record systems use different data formats, systems like Google’s will have to be able to import most, if not all, of them, pushing up complexity and cost.
Privacy. Third-party systems such as Google’s aren’t regulated by federal medical-privacy laws, giving vendors like Google plenty of freedom to, for instance, sell ads tailored to your medical profile. (Google told the WSJ that “trust between Google and our users is one of the absolute cornerstones of our business.”)

Unmentioned by the WSJ is another nagging question, which is whether patients will be free to edit, selectively present or even delete portions of their medical information. As I’ve noted before, the potential for “whitewashed” health records could undermine their usefulness to doctors, while limiting peoples’ freedom to edit them makes them a whole lot less “personal.”

Meanwhile, don’t forget that we’ve already seen what appears to be early prototypes of the Google Health site. As for the launch itself, I suspect we won’t be able to miss it when it actually happens. Accept no substitutes.

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