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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?
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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
For finally finding a shark to jump.
This post patent pending.
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.
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.
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.
And honestly, I don't mind targeted ads - if done right I might actually be interested! Compare those to cable TV ads...
The issue is when that data is retained after processing and potentially lost/given/used inappropriately.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You can have my health records when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
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'?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd get you an evil meter, but it might not be calibrated, anyone has a pure 1000 kiloNazi signal to check with? The Cheyney reading is off the meter...
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
...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.
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.
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.
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
Sure he does. If I give you a beer, that beer is free. For you that is. I probably paid for it. 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 of the implication, that enough beer is bought, so that the likelihood of anyone being "thirsty" afterwards, is sufficiently small. There is no restriction that you can only drink whatever it is you actually paid for. Sure, some will drink a bit more than they actually paid for, and others less, but if the group is sufficiently homogeneous, the discrepancy should be negligible. So why bother with the overhead of accounting for each and every beer - it only makes the hangover worse?
The grandparent doesn't pay his health care with his taxes; he pays for the right to have free access to health care. There is a great difference in that. It is both a form of insurance and a form of wealth redistribution. Insurance, because you pay a small amount, which may or may not be returned to you as health care. (I once attended a statistics lecture, where the professor said that insurance is a bet you make with the insurance company, that you will become sick. A bet that you would probably prefer to lose.) And wealth redistribution because a poor person will probably benefit more (or rather: pay less) than a rich person. In both cases it is a form of risk distribution. Some "libertarians" might say that this is not good. But as the risk of many forms of bad health are distributed "unfairly", by chance or genetics, I believe that it is right for society to compensate for this unfair distribution. Being genetically predisposed to a disease is not something a person can make an informed choice about, and anyone can get injured in an accident - so why not lessen the consequences of these risks by sharing them?
An interesting observation is that for a "social" system to work properly, there seems to be a requirement for an initial state of relative homogeneity. In a very flat society where the difference between poor and rich is small, the rich people will lose relatively little. if the difference is large, the top side will be very reluctant to change to a system of fair redistribution. Even though such a system would probably - viewed as a whole - benefit a lot more from it.
-Lasse
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.