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."
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.
Seriously -- I was reading their statements at the time, and it was clear as day. They do automated analysis for targeting ads, but don't do any cross-correlation that would be a privacy breach in the sense that any other human being finds out something they shouldn't.
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.
Try a judicious amount of wavelet compression. You can get 100:1 and better while retaining a highly accurate image. JPEG-2000 uses wavelets and is an accepted part of the DICOM standard for diagnostic imaging. You do want a qualified person deciding how much compression to apply once it gets to the lossy threshhold (~10:1 or so).
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
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.
Regulations are in place. as for ownership. The paper/film/media the records are on belong to the doctor/hospital/practice, but the data itself belongs to the patient. you can read about the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 http://www.patientprivacyrights.org/site/PageServer#
When all else fails, try.
...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