I spent some time last night tooling around on Google Health, the omnipresent search engine's latest attempt to colonize my world. G-Health lets you create a total medical profile: Personal characteristics, conditions, doctors, test results, medications, immunizations, and on, and on, and on. They warn you of worrying drug interactions and even let you import your health records from providers. Google promises that third-party applications are being developed, and users will eventually be able to choose from a rich variety of services that let you do everything from refill prescriptions to schedule appointments. All in all, it's an impressive interface. Here's the problem: My health records are in a manila envelope, in a wall-sized file cabinet, somewhere on K and 21st Street (and we're not even getting into the thick document stored in some basement in California). Paper is not interoperable with Google. Now, I could begin inputting my health records by hand, and because I'm a nerd, I might do that. But most won't. So until the provider community decides to step up and commit to one (or even a couple) standard electronic health record platforms, G-Health won't be much more than a curiosity. But down the road, when electronic health records are either required by the government or demanded by the market, G-Health will be a fascinating system. For one thing, it's completely portable and user-controlled. Aetna's CEO is bragging about his superior system, but given that that system is controlled by Aetna and I'm not, it's of little use to me. G-Health, by contrast, can be used by anyone, and thus has much more potential to become the standard than do proprietary systems. There are, of course, questions of privacy. And those questions need to be balanced by the utility of actually having and analyzing good data that could improve care quality. If Google gets all this information, then squirrels it away, it's robbed of its potential to improve care. But if they have some system for coding it anonymously in ways that researchers can nevertheless use, they risk bad press (here, incidentally, is the privacy policy). Which is why G-Health is probably a stopgap solution that will help individuals better control their records. The actual health system won't move into the electronic age till the government sets standards and creates funding to help it do so.
