It seems like Google Health is finally launched. I was waiting for this, because the only thing that was made public earlier by Google were a few screenshots on their blog.
Google Health is a personal medical file where you can put allergies, antecedents, results among other personal medical information. Your file can be made available to other healthcare actors like your practitioner, hospital or physician. You can even find a doctor that suits your needs. You can also browse their encyclopedia and link the results to your file.
At this stage, Google Health is only available for the US. It works closely with Cleveland Clinic (the pilot) and a few other institutions. The purpose would be to have a decentral, globally accessible file instead of one at your practicioner, the other at a hospital, etc and to make facilitate the interchange of documents in your file. In other words: ease your medical life.
With this, Google is making an extra step towards what it knows about me: Google knows what I’m reading (Google Reader), what I’m mailing (Gmail), what I’m searching (Google Search), where I’m going (Google Maps), etc. Now Google can also know about my health. Scary, huh? It can be a real danger. Suppose that someone gets in and steals information in order to sell it to insurance companies. If your file contains sensitive stuff, you might not be able to get an insurance anywhere. Security is a primary concern, here.
Microsoft has a similar product, HealthVault. Finland is also working on a global medical patient record for its 7 million citizens.
In order to become a success, Google will have to collaborate with a lot of healthcare institutions. I don’t know if in my country, Belgium, they are looking forward to that.
