Slashdot Mirror
Google to Offer Online Personal Health Records
hhavensteincw writes "Less than two weeks after Microsoft announced plans to offer personal health records, Google announced today that it plans to offer online personal health records to help patients tote and store their own x-rays and other health data. Google made the announcement Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco."
We don't have enough of your personal data. Why don't you let us have your health records too?
Naturally. After all, Google is "good" not "evil". Riiiiight.
is it?
targeted ads for calcium supplements next to broken bone x-rays, valtrex next to any note with keyword "itchy" or "burns", viagra/levitra with "limp". the possibilities are endless!
The IRS is the one organization that you don't want to fuck with. Remember, these are the guys who took down Al Capone.
Knowing google's scouring abilities, I'm sure they already have everyone's anyway.
...of all the targeted ads you'll get if you have erectile dysfunction...
This idea is far from new. I interviewed with a small company back in 99 called e-medsoft.com that was trying to put medical records online. The idea has a lot of merit when you look at all the paper that moves from place to place in the health care industry. The company I interviewed with went belly up, because it was too hard to get people to adopt the technology. It needs to be nearly ubiquitous to add the most value. Plus, there are a lot of regulations and privacy laws in place which make it a little more difficult to effectively do business in this space.
Sheldon called this!
There's no excuse for using Google for anything. Considering Google's #1 motive seems to be to collect as much information as possible on the public, it really makes you question their ultimate goals and wonder about how such a young company got so much funding so quickly to become the monolith they are.
"Free" is far, far too expensive of a price to pay for any of Google's "services", as neat as they may be.
http://www.scroogle.org/ (they even have a https Firefox plugin and an IE agent available) is a good alternative for searching. Don't forget to disable in your hosts file or via adblock all of Google's ads and tracking robots that track 90% of the websites you visit.
So are they going to scan for free (or even a small fee) the approx 40x60 cm films I got from my doctor when I moved? The nearby Kinko's can't do film that size... unless they treat it as printed material, which would be a lousy scan.
I can't believe I'm about to quote this movie, I really never thought it would happen... From Roadhouse:
Doc: Do you always carry your medical record around with you?
Dalton: Saves time.
Now, if only we could have a story that I could relate the sex scene in the back room of the bar to. "But I'm on my break!"
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it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Why can't *I* keep my medical records on me, on my person with a password on me, on my person?
The way I figure it is an encrypted USB drive and public key that I give my current provider.
I would also like to fire them (and their ability to have access to my records) at whim.
Unlike Clooney, I want *MY* data to be MINE. Not in the hands of others.
Google with my records? I don't think so.
This is great, now we can see celebrity medical records. CmdrTaco's records should pop right up!
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
:D I very much doubt there are any chairs flying, but I'm rather certain the monkeys want their dance back.
It's entirely possible I'm clueless here, but this service seems to target a rather small market. How many people do you know that collect and track their own medical records? I'm sure people do, but enough that two massive companies would both jump on trying to make a market opportunity out of it in two weeks time? I think it's much more likely one of them has been working on it, and the other heard about it and quickly released a reactionary product, and Google doesn't strike me as the knee-jerk reaction kind of company. Fast, perhaps, but would they go out of there way to compete for such a small market if they didn't already have prior interest? Now look at it from the other side, would MS engage in such behavior?
No tin foil hats or supporting facts, just one company with a track record of underhanded business practices and a stated desire to crush the other.
Epidemiological data mining. Google Earth overlays, with clusters of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, tooth decay, and E. coli infections near fast food restaurants. There might be clusters of radon-related lung cancer. There are some really nifty things you could find out by centralizing medical records. Alter or improve traffic patterns in neighborhoods where statistically more people are getting hit by cars.
I'm not advocating that we actually do all this, just pointing out some possibilities.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Google announced today that it plans to offer online personal health records to help patients tote and store their own x-rays and other health data.
What, are they going to put all the ones and zeros in little baggies or something?
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
I'm in the EMR industry, and I heard about Google's initiative long before Microsoft announced theirs.
"Good" vs "evil" has nothing to do with it. Google getting into this first is fact.
See cid=20905389: I was just joking about this, but maybe I should start a checklist.
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
Hmmm, so who do I want to keep my medical records with, Google or Microsoft ..... Anybody has an accurate evil-o-meter handy?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The next step is to automatically analyze them. Like researchers (including myself) are doing already.
Don't think about individuals who want to track their own medical records. Think about the morass of EMR vendors with incompatible solutions who can't share data, so doctors have no way to get a patient's record from System A to System B when doing a referral or when a patient moves.
And as for money -- there's real money here. Doctors' eyeballs are worth more to advertisers than anyone else's.
There are numerous companies that are ahead of Google when it comes to Personal Health Records.
You can see a list of these companies at MyPhr.Com. Wikipedia also has a good article.
Steve Case has started a company called Revolution Health
I work at a PHR company called ICW which is headquartered in Germany.
I think it's all very exciting as long as you see in the context of the other offerings that are out there.
-Larry
For finally finding a shark to jump.
This post patent pending.
Previously I had said that I worried about Microsoft running a repository of health data. With Google announcing a similar initiative, I am less worried.
It's not because Microsoft is evil and Google is good. It's because there's competition, so Microsoft can't just run the whole show.
Make no mistake --it's still a worrisome thing. No one entity should have such a large portion of our data.
For those whose warm fuzzy feelings about Google blind them to the danger: the problem is not that Larry Page and Sergey Brin are evil. It's that eventually someone else evil may take the reins. Entities like the USA and Germany used to be good, too, before the "right" (well, wrong) leader took control.
And for those of you trying to spin this as a "look at all the statistical analysis Google can do for the good of the world" --well, good. Google can go purchase the aggregated statistical data from an independent company. There's no need for Google itself to get its hands on individual data points.
Be scared, people. The growing data-aggregation power of Google is as ominous as software patents had been a few years ago: "Yeah, yeah, we know the theoretical danger, but it'll be a long long time before it actually happens." Be very scared.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
They at least won't be able to hear your conversations. Well they will, but it'll just sound like gibberish.
Now where the hell did this rotating green diamond over my head come from?
How is this a troll? The AC is 100% correct.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
In light of that recent (major) data leak, can we trust even such a supposedly reliable bastion as Google to store such sensitive information?
Corporations seem to have more data on us than our own government. This worries me.
The problem is Google doesn't spell out how they use your data. I believed that Google only displayed ads based on what was on the page when I opened an e-mail. They MIGHT do this, or they might scour the e-mail for information and attach it to my username. I don't know. When Gmail was first launched Google made it sound like they did the former, only after reading the privacy policy did I realize they left themselves open to do the latter.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
No, MS is simply going after VistA. Now that the MS marketing engine has had a year to Google-bomb them out of existence. After all, if it doesn't exist in Google then it's not on the net, right?
With somewhat more than a year of MS' loyal media outlets yammering about MS Windows Vista and 'turfers and Gold Partners setting up blogs and fake websites about MS Windows Vista, the real VistA should be long gone from even the caches. Don't even get me started on the corporate PR playground that is Wikipedia.
So now, when administrators decide to investigate what's the most widely used medial record system, they won't likely find it on the net. Nor will they find out that it is modular, standards, based and like most software, VistA is Open Source *.
(OK, technically it's public domain, but you do get the source under a Crowley-style license as a result.)
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
it really makes you question their ultimate goals
Why? Google is all about targeted advertising. Better profiles on us just lets them deliver better ads. These profiles are what Google, Microsoft, etc are all fighting over.
No matter what records you upload to it it always does the same thing:
Clippy - "It looks like your dying of cancer"
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Exactly. This can be done, but it's not by Google. They might be capable, but their entire business model screams against this. I have dealt with various EMR systems and there is no way that they are ready to offer data in an open way. They all operate off of non-standard databases and their developers are worth a shit. This is big PR bullshit. They are no way ready to start doing this. It might as well be flying cars.
For future records, yes. If I treat you and subsequently you fire me, you have every right that I not be able to see records of your future medical care. However, any records of your care (or records you previously have had sent to me from other providers) not only should, but must (by law) be maintained by me and thus available to me.
Of course I might be willing to agree to remove your records from my office or record storage facility if: 1) it were no longer against the law, 2) there was no issue with FDA regulated drug abuse or diversion, and 3) by doing so you relinquish all rights in the future to sue me since your medical record is my entire documentation of my version of events should we have a disagreement in the future.
Wow, the convenience! Wow, the spam! Wow, the research possibilities! Wow, the fraud!
I think the more serious question is, is it inevitable? Probably.
Would I prefer Google or MS to do it? No. Is it going to be one of them? probably.
I never got excited about "net neutrality" 'cause whiever way it goes, somebody gets screwed.
I used to be "super privacy man!" but looking more deeply at things like this, and I don't have a strong position other than "well, we'd better learn to keep an eye on our data - one more thing on the list."
I think it's funny that cluster studies have been brought up as a positive... that's one of the areas that led me to spend more time trying to check the data when I hear about a study... it's kind of shocking how much innumeracy falls inbetween data and conclusions.
If you had an encrypted USB stick and you become incapacitated, you wouldn't be be able to tell them what the key was. There would have to be some way for emergency personnel to access the records without help from the patient.
You can have my health records when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
This is the project that Adam Woswrth was working on. He has left now google
http://www.adambosworth.net/
The one concern that I would have about this in the hands of the consumer is data suppression. For 97% of people that is of no importance, but in a small percentage its pertinent. (I am an ER doctor, so necessarily I am a bit jaded.)
For example, I've been lied to many times by patients regarding narcotic pain medicine prescriptions. For example, I treated someone this year to whom I gave an rx for 30 vicodins. I get a letter a month later from the State Controlled Substance guys (because one physician who rx'd to this patient requested a print out of the patient's controlled substance prescription records - which triggers a letter sent to everyone who rx'd him controlled medicines in the past.) So this guy had gotten the equivalent of 30 vicodins daily over a period of a few months (from many doctors, using different pharmacies, often getting two or three rxs in one day.) This means either he is in fulminant liver failure from all the tylenol or he's selling it for fun'n'profit.
So now, if he returns to my hospital (or any of the physicians or hospitals he shopped at) any provider who has not seen him before can pull his record their and see his real history. That's the benefit of a record that is out of the hands of the patient. Now that is meaningless for the 97% of people who are above-board. However the fact that the 3% exist do mean that any patient maintained record that providers can't add to independent of the patient's wishes will be taken with at least a bit of a grain of salt in some circumstances. Your old EKG or Chest Xray is not going to be suspect, but the report that you have only filled one rx for vicodin in the past 6 years and your 'documented allergy' to every pain medicine except for vicodin might be a bit suspect.
Gambler demographic: You seem to be having some broken kneecaps. Would you like to buy the book '12 easy tips on how to repay your 30% loans before the end of the week, guaranteed'?
Soccer mom demographic: You seem to be having a broken hipbone. Would you like to buy the book '12 easy excuses to tell your husband when your secret lover is too rough in bed'?
School nerd demographic: You seem to be having a broken finger. Would you like to buy the book '12 easy ways to teach your football team a lesson they'll remember for a long time'?
Protester demographic: You seem to be having a broken arm. Would you like to buy the book '12 easy ways to taunt the cops safely in any street march'?
Soldier demographic: You seem to be having a broken foot. Would you like to buy the book '12 easy ways to break doors in during house to house combat'?
and YouTube and you get Google Blackmail!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
This is no problem where I live. By law I have the right to access all my medical records, and the hospital is allready storing my records and X-rays digital. I trust the the hospitals more than Google anyway :-)
:-)
I live in a country with free health care, so I have control over my health care information. It's a part of what makes a democracy
#find
stuff like this is really valuable to their rejection process.
"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." And that's exactly that they seem to be doing. I don't get it when people argue that Google is evil because they want information. Information, and the processing or storage of it, is not a bad thing. It's a persons/organizations motivations that are capable of being good and bad. And generally Google = Good, other companies (Microsoft) = Bad.
After all, what is the point.
What should worry you is when you start getting spam for cemetery plots.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't see what the big deal is. Just let the patients have access to their own medical records. They can give me hard copies, or soft copies, I don't care. Those records in my possession will be valuable in themselves. The integration and centralization can always come later, as that will probably require more time and more work.
If I take a picture of you, it is a picture of YOU, but MY picture. The english language really fails here because you could also say it is your picture as in you are in the picture without actually owning said picture.
Medical records are of a person, but are created by another person reflecting that persons opinions about that other person. Who owns a record, the person who wrote it or who it is about? You can say that you want your records in your hands but you are quit right that this would remove from the doctor all the information he has collected that he could need in a lawsuit. It would be like saying, that speedcamera picture belongs to me, okay, now I got it, go ahead and prove I speeded. HAHA!
I think we barking up the wrong tree here, medical records being kept is useful, useful for the patient because a doctor can see your history. Useful for the doctor since it saves time, useful for society since you can use it to tell what is happening to the population.
What we need to do is put extremely harsh punishements in place against abuse. Sell medical data, serious jail time for EVERYONE involved, the person who stole it, who transported it, who bought it and who used it.
Because abuse is possible of something doesn't mean you get rid of something, you get rid of the abuser.
Offcourse this is hard to believe in when even the most basic save guards against abuse of our freedoms are being trampled on the world over.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No matter where I take it, it beeps like it is in the presence of the dark lord himself. No idea what causes it, was like that when I first took it out of the package.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
willing or not here they come....
>>>please remove "nospam" from email address
I don't think that the intent is to scan and catalog information regarding feces, or to copulate with said feces. However, that might be in Rev 2.
The CDC Epidemiology Program Office is one the best, if not the best, epidemiology programs in the world. And they work with sanitized (i.e. private) data and they don't need to know how many times a day you read Slashdot or what type of dirty messages your sending your s/o (although that might be related to your infection ;p).
As others have pointed out above, giving data like this to Google is just *stupid*. The medical records I have in my possession are in a locked fire-safe and only come out when I change doctors or go to a new one.
Anyone stupid enough to put this kind of information into the hands of Google, deserves all the horrid effects of the information security mis-haps that are on the horizon.
...people can barely deal with having their credit card numbers stolen and credit history ruined as a result of whack purchases etc...and they expect people to be receptive to this?
Come on...this is asking for trouble, and makes it quite clear, more so than any other service Google has offered, that Google is strictly into data mining information from the stupid.
This is going to take hacking and personal information security into a whole new dimension...
un-huh. So what's to stop you from making an account using a name that's not yours, using a spamcatcher webmail account?
Or do you think my real name is Pope Ratzo?
Posting with an account lets the rest of us evaluate just how much weight to give your comments. Posting as an AC lets us assume you're full of shit.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I remember those three episodes by Discovery on our possible future.
In one of the episodes, some guy was pouring old urine in his own toilet, since the toilet was equipped with built-in analyzer. The analyzer would catch he had some beer yesterday, while the doctor told him his heath condition doesn't allow alcohol.
If the toilet detects he had beer, it'll go in his central medical record, his insurance company would see this, and he'd lose his medical insurance.
He later fell through a window after an accident, and the blood test went to the insurance company again, and he lost his insurance, remaining to be left dying, although this had nothing to do with his health condition prior to the accident.
I got the correct answer on last week's poll http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=325121&cid=20943041
Microsoft wants your electronic medical records. So does Google. So do dozens of startups, some dead, some alive and well. What do all these privately owned for-profit companies' plans have in common? Profit motive. What do their data formats have in common? Not a thing. So if a patient's customary healthcare provider uses, say, U_Med_Data (a fictitious company, I hope), and her employer changes insurance carriers so she has to choose a new healthcare provider who uses, say, Microsoft or Google, U_Med_Data's proprietary data formats mean the patient's records can not be transferred to the new carrier's system except on paper, which of course defeats the purpose of EMRs.
Every large medical center has EMRs to promote in-system efficiency and communication. Their EMRs are bought from different vendors, then woven into the center's overall I.T. fabric, including billing of patients, primary and secondary insurers, prescription writing and filling, and case management. If the medical center wanted to change EMR providers, good luck, without a costly conversion. And if he patient changes to another provider, again, the records stay, or possibly get printed to send to the new provider.
Everyone agrees EMRs are great for efficiency, accuracy, and completeness - but the promise of EMRs is only a pipe dream without standards and interoperability, not to mention iron-clad built-in privacy and security to ensure that private records stay private.
Bad is when you can google "Where are my neighbor's car keys?"
paintball
...and comparatively slow and less precise in relevance. I also remember AltaVista as the best thing going before I'd heard of Google (and NorthernLight at about the same time, if anyone remembers that). Searching for specific code snippets and developer resources was tedious, and it got *much* easier for me when Google came along.
Really, does anyone remember how the speed difference felt at the time? Google was the first major search engine I saw printing the search execution time on the results page, and its responsiveness felt like my first time using broadband after years of dial-up.
Pi Ran Out
I'm not sure when people started trusting Oracle, MS, Sun, Apple, etc, more than Google. Every one of the previously mentioned companies have burned me with marketing schemes, mistrust, EULA's, and flat out lies... except Google. This technology shift is going to happen regardless. I'd MUCH rather have Google housing my information than Microsoft. Google has never abused my trust.
People cry constantly about Google having too much information. They have just as much information as everyone else. They are just so much smarter they can index it and search it instantly. When Google abuses my information I'll stop trusting them. But when they've given me consistently high quality software for free, never mislead me or lied to me, well... I'm sure as hell quicker to support a company with such a great track record than a company that makes it its business to deceive its customers.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Ah, so it isn't the message, but the messenger that matters...
Silly moderators...did you actually read the post he referenced? It is highly topical. We live in a data driven world now...he who controls the data will control everything. Not only that, he specifically referenced the link between Google and medical care.
Reading is fundamental.
Dave Kellett, the artist who draws Sheldon predicted this in his "Microsoft Healthcare" series of comics last week. Here they are (the prediction's in the last one):
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/071010.html
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/071011.html
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/071012.html
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So you just end up trusting another organization with all your searching needs instead? An organization that isn't under constant public scrutiny and has little/no motive for actually keeping your searches private? Seems a little misplaced to me...
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
From Google's privacy policy:
If Google becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, we will provide notice before personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
Notice it doesn't say you'll have the option of EVER having google destroy your data at your request, nor does it say the policy won't change without your consent.
The privacy policy of data in hospitals, doctor's offices, etc, is LAW, not corporate whim.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act
Google is just doing something to centralize this. Personally, I would much rather have Google handling it than say....Microsoft?
There's no excuse for using Google for anything. This suggests that google is so fundamentally evil none of their products can be trusted. Considering Google's #1 motive seems to be to collect as much information as possible on the public There's no evidence that google is in any way, shape, or form, trying to acquire information specifically on the public. This little modifier makes it seem like google's ultimate goal is to know everything about everyone, regardless of the price paid. Google's real searching goal is to collect as much publicly available information on all subjects as possible. That's a huge difference. The GP wants to make it seem somehow Google has plans to control people via privileged information. it really makes you question their ultimate goals and wonder about how such a young company got so much funding so quickly to become the monolith they are. I can't even begin to fathom what they are suggesting here. Maybe that the NSA somehow funds google and there's some covert CIA plan to use google to take over the world? I think the ultimate gist of the quote is somehow google gets secret funding from some entity that ultimately wants total control over the world. The real reason google became so successful so quickly is because their leaders and founders are really really smart (shocking, I know). Most large tech companies are large because they got into the game early and made OK products w/ a little bit of strong arming. Google actually got into the market fairly late in the game with many many obstacles to overcome. They become popular based of products that were so superior people took a step back and said "why are we still using this garbage when google X is so much better". That takes a lot for people to do.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
"I live in a country with free health care"
Please tell me what country this is that provides healthcare for free.
Every country I've ever heard of that provides healthcare makes you pay for it in taxes.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
I worked for a major Canadian hospital and met with Microsoft in 2004 where they talked about their EMR plans. To tell you the truth, it was spooky. They had a presentation about this clumsy guy who kept getting in accidents, but it was ok, Microsoft's health care record, backed up hospital repair-shops, were there to save him, with oh so simple billing. It was intended for a Usonian market, and had all those for-profit assumptions, which really showed you how much attention they were willing to pay. It reminded me of a presentation I'd seen where the Usonian company thought they'd "Canadianized" their presentation by changing the dummy account home towns.. yet they all had AOL addresses (we don't use AOL here).
"http://www.scroogle.org/"
Ahh yes, I'm going to use a privacy service run by Daniel Brandt, who is well known around Wikipedia for collecting intimate personal information on editors (name, address, DOB, occupation, relatives, sexual orientation, etc) and posting it online, regardless of the user's age or other demographics (posting personal info on 12 year-olds online? fucktard). That's the epitome of privacy, right there!
Fucking idiot. Burn in hell.
As stated on http://www.google.com/corporate/, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
It's hardly surprising then, or nefarious, that Google's product announcements tend to focus on information gathering and management rather than, say, toasters.
otherwise, they cannot meet HIPPA Federal law.
which means Google just solved every backdoor and hacker hole in the universe.
all hail King Google!
-- or wait, if they DIDN'T fix this all, they're all going to prison.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
...for this stuff is going to be located in Pryor, Oklahoma where all they have to worry about is tornados in the spring/summer and ice storms in the winter.
To slightly generalise, how long do all of these companies think they should be the ones maintaining 90% of the world's personal data and communication's needs? If there is an urgency now to migrate people's lifestyles to electronic venues then surely centralised and wide publicity based campaigns would be the quickest, however how does this effect the long term economy, culture and education of people looking after themselves? If one were to presume that the future is people maintaining their own computer files the way they can iron and put away their clothes, do these companies care about whether they are prolonging this future from happening? And if people knew the advantages of both methods, what would it take to boycott one and put some effort into attaining the other? Will education forever be viewed as a threat to social economy?
The obvious solution is to consider the data as a record of the relation between the health care provider and the patient. Both have interests in preserving a copy of these data, and in ensuring that they are not tampered with. So obviously each should store a copy, signed by each party. The health care provider could optionally be allowed or required by law to store the data for a certain period and/or discard the data after a certain time.
The question is, would it be prudent to impose a similar requirement on the patient? And how about giving consent to access old records? In a world of commercial medicine like the USA, this is perhaps not the same choice as in a world of primarily public/social medicine like Denmark. Should it be legal for insurance companies to require full disclosure in order to get insurance? I think not, but then, I'm all for public/social medicine.
Finally there is the issue about access to these records in an emergency, where the patient is unconscious and cannot give consent. A more or less centralized backup service could store the complete health record of a person, but encrypted, so that only people or organisations designated by the patient have an emergency key, and can gain access to just those data the patient has deemed desirable to expose in case of an emergency. For instance, a person who had been cured from an STD, would not want the record of the STD to be accessible, as it wouldn't matter much in an emergency, whereas data such as blood type, or severe medical allergies, would definitely matter. But would AIDS for example be a condition that should be required in the emergency records?
Making the decisions would not be easy for the patient, and most people would rather not be bothered to have to manage their own copy of the records, so perhaps the persons usual GP would be a good compromise for a designated Health Record manager for the patient. Of course, this results in a potential conflict of interest, so there would have to be a solution that would allow the patient to at least monitor any access (and object to illegal or unfounded access) to his records, that was granted by the GP. Hence the centralized third party backup or storage service.
-Lasse
So, Google wants me to:
use there e-mail
use there calendar
store all of my my documents & files
store all of my pictures & videos
and now my personal health records
Not that I'm paranoid but I think my X-Rays are in good hands with my Primary Physician
And now, folks, it's time for "Who do you trust!" Hubba, hubba, hubba! Money, money, money! Who do you trust? Me? I'm giving away free money.
- The Joker, Batman
"If a group of people pool their money to buy a couple of beer crates, and party - guess what: the beer is free. Even though everyone in the group paid for it. Why?"
Because you're insane and out of touch with reality?
Nothing you said is accurate, or even rational. Your beer example is so contrived and ridiculous that it calls your ability to reason into question.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Google could be doing this simply to begin using existing U.S. laws like HIPPA to turn the tables on the government. AFAIK: Under HIPPA, the government must get a warrant for any and all information and if Google can tie a users profile up with the HIPPA law (equal? to EU Privacy laws) as it is the strongest privacy law in the United States.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Absolutely. This is something that I'm working on, and something that needs to get more exposure. Moderators -- please mod me up. I don't need the karma, but this is important information.
The *right* way to handle medical records is to keep them in the hands of individuals. Even physicians -- who currently store our records -- arguably don't need to retain permanent copies of our personal information.
However, there's something of a conflict between the benefits of personally-managed PHI (Personal Health Information) and the efficiencies and accuracies gained by computerized PHI. If your physician can put your data in a computer, it can automatically do things like checking if a prescription is contraindicated based on medications you're already taking, or health conditions you have. There are huge health benefits to that; lots of people die every year because physicians give them the wrong drugs, either through error or because the doctor simply wasn't given complete information by the patient (this is especially problematic with the elderly, who take *many* medications and have limited ability to keep track of them).
The solution, of course, is a standardized medical information storage format, so that you can carry your data, but your physician's computer can read and process it.
The American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP) has sponsored the development of an XML-based format to do exactly that. It's called the Continuity of Care Record. It's a bit of a weird format, but there's a version 2.0 in progress that fixes those issues, and there is also a lot of other work going on in the development of systems that produce, consume and transform CCR documents.
As a bridge between the current world and a future where all physicians have CCR-accepting systems in their offices, an approach has been developed that allows the data to be embedded inside a PDF. Basically, you apply a transform to turn the CCR into a human-readable PDF (well, human readable if you look at it in a PDF viewer, or print it), and then you also embed the raw CCR XML in a hidden "layer" in the PDF. Tools that understand CCR can easily retrieve and process the XML data, physicians that don't have such tools can simply use a PDF viewer, or print the PDF and still get exactly the same information that way.
The CCR isn't an ivory-tower standard that has no chance of real-world deployment, either. There are already various organizations using it. MinuteClinic generates a CCR for every patient visit, and gives it to them (in a human-readable format, on paper) -- 30,000 of them per week. Nearly all of the major physician practice management system makers have committed to support CCR, and most of them can already produce it.
The solution to better flow of PHI isn't GoogleHealth, or Microsoft HealthVault, it's standard and widely-accepted data formats so that patients can easily carry their PHI with them wherever they need it. Once that's in place, I think there's a place for on-line repositories, primarily as a mechanism for "off-site backups", but the first goal should be to make it possible for patients to manage and control their own data.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The message content is certainly important--and the messenger strongly influences the context. Ultimately, the context is decisive.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
2004 is before I heard about Google's plans -- so it sounds like they've both been in this space for a while.
"Use www.scroogle.org for privacy"
Ahh yes, I'm going to use a privacy service run by Daniel Brandt, who is well known around Wikipedia for collecting intimate personal information on editors (name, address, DOB, occupation, relatives, sexual orientation, etc) and posting it online, regardless of the user's age or other demographics (posting personal info on kids online? fucktard). That's the epitome of privacy, right there!
It's HIPAA! NOT HIPPA
Health
Insurance
Portability and
Accountability
Act
Great, my first slashdot post, and I'm a grammar Nazi. You tool.
I would say that there's an important message implicit in the fact that someone chooses to willingly accept the identity of "Anonymous Coward", especially since they could have created an account without divulging their identity as a high-ranking official in the Roman Catholic Church or NSA.
Do you really believe that there are commentors here at Slashdot that don't realize they can maintain their anonymity but still create an account, thus giving the rest of us the means by which to weigh their contributions according to their previous history?
I give us more credit than that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think if this is to become a trend, then it is in the public's interest to have the format for the records be a standard. This way people can move their records from service to service and have choice as to who is managing their records. Paper is a nice interoperable exchange because it will fit in any file cabinet; hopefully, the same can be said about digital records especially if the big boys are getting into the market.
I will pay to get my medical files digitized when the company can .... I would like to know my medical records ... conversions with ... the medical pictures will always explain
provide non-proprietary "*.odf" file-formates with all content
correctly identified with validated XML based on a registered
international standardized medical DTD and Schema. The style-sheet
svg screen/print reports (OPEN) standardized to import OCR XML-tagged
text/images from medical diagnostic systems and Voice2Text doctor
report-recorders and
are always secure and usable by medical personnel globally; So, be
sure to make the forms translate to all major (20 to 100) languages,
which would include meter/foot, gram/pound
correct medial terms
themselves, but an "Open" standard file-format should be required.
I think maybe Google or Yahoo could with international corporation provide
a reasonable turnkey solution for patients and doctors by 2021 (I don't know
where M$ will be in 2021).
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Exactly, Ms Mayer. People should control their data. Not your company.
"Because you're insane and out of touch with reality?"
Nothing you said makes me think that post was any less accurate than it was when I first posted it.
"Tell you what: if you ever come to Aarhus, Denmark, look me up, and I'll give you free beer"
Sorry, but I have no desire to spend any time babysitting someone with the kind of stunted intellect that thinks "free" means "someone else paid for it".
I really really hope it's a language thing now, because I can't honestly see how someone could have the ability to type while being as mentally deficient as your attempted argument made you appear.
"OK, troll, I'll accept your flamebait."
Great, thanks for admitting I was right. That's the only reason people like you start calling "troll" and "flamebait", and damn if you didn't run right to it.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
I agree in sentiment, but how on earth do you plan to own your data?
It's like owning a piece of music. Impossible.
expandfairuse.org
Google already buys data from other sources (read their privacy policy) and consolidates that with the MOUNTAIN of information they keep on individuals -- including scanning and indexing your email, recording every search you make, and, if you use the Google Toolbar in 'advanced' mode (ie. you can see Page Rank) -- they record EVERY search you make. Now, in addition to already knowing you have aids, diabetes or erection disfunction (based on your searches and the ads you click) -- they want even MORE evidence. This will become VERY EVIL once Google decides to sell this information to the insurance companies. Does anyone have the SLIGHTEST CLUE where Google's master plan is going? Does anyone (besides me) CARE?
I meant it as a sarcastic remark. Simply referring to the fact that I don't trust hospitals/doctors in general, I didn't mean concerning privacy specifically. I've heard stories about people having an experience at the doctor that put horror stories about Dell's customer service to shame. Would I feel better giving my social security number to a doctor than I would giving it to some random Google employee? Of course. That doesn't mean I trust a doctor with my life the way I should be able to.
I sit corrected. :)
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.