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Google Health Opens To the Public
Several readers noted that the limited pilot test of Google Health has ended, and Google is now offering the service to the public at large. Google Health allows patients to enter health information, such as conditions and prescriptions, find related medical information, and share information with their health care providers (at the patient's request). Information may be entered manually or imported from partnered health care providers. The service is offered free of charge, and Google won't be including advertising. The WSJ and the NYTimes provide details about Google's numerous health partners.
I for one won't be using it while their terms of service explicitly states that HIPAA doesn't apply to Google.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I can see "Need Liver or Kidneys?" coming about in the recommended searches.
Let's enter, Chest Pain, Left Arm Numb, Smells of Toast! Ohhh I can earn 950 a day working at home... Let's click that... hey I won a free Ipod... today is my luc. *beeeeeeeeeeeeep*
What bothers me is that all this is built on top of tcp/ip, and that is inherently insecure.
Given that there exists hardware to inspect packets for p2p traffic, how hard would it be to for a person of unpleasant intent to get hold of some of that and start mining 'encrypted' health information.
I can see it now, 'want to get health insurance again? Pay us x dollars or we expose condition y to your health insurance provider.'
Come to think of it, all they'd need to do is pretend they had the info, someone would be bound to be hiding a condition they could hit with random emails.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Just wait till you hear about the plan they have to go after the Nigerian 409 scammers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm getting ready to start googling for an organ doner when my liver finally gives up on me.
Hopefully people will be smart enough to go visit a real doctor, rather than listen to the internet about all their life's little concerns. Sometimes symptoms may be generic to multiple conditions and self diagnosis can do more harm than help. Maybe this will set Darwinism to work at it's full potential.
so, google will have your surfing profile, your financial information, tons of images of you, your house, your friends, your networks, and how will add to it your health information. You know, Big Brother can be a government, but it can also be a corporation. Even one that claims not to do any evil.
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
Yes, Google Health supports advertising. Spamming, even. Read the developer guidelines. Google just doesn't run the ads themselves. That's outsourced to "affiliates".
There are some rules for affiliates, like "one spam per week per user" and "no popups or popunders". Other than that, consumers are fair game. In particular, affiliates are not prohibited from using Google health data to target ads, as long as they "disclose" that somewhere in their "privacy policy". The policy says "Only use Google Health user data for the purposes disclosed in your privacy policy, and obtain users' opt-in consent if personally identifiable health data will be used for ad targeting." So a bit of fine print, and the affiliate 0wns your health history.
It's a typical slimeball tactic - pretend to be the good guy, encourage "affiliates" to do the bad stuff.
I didn't realize it was mandatory for US citizens to use this service.
Good to know.
Also good to know that companies will be using our health history against us. Because they all care about us, individually.
I am dealing with a rare side effect from a fluoroquinolone, (think cipro, levaquin) called peripheral neuropathy. I plugged the antibiotic into google health and the side effect was not listed on the package insert. While its good to have drug interactions listed, lots of people have side effects from drugs and they need to be explicitly spelled out, not hiding in a sub menu.
I know for a fact that there is explicit warnings on the packages about this particular reaction and I'm livid it isn't warning about it on the package insert in google. Especially since it can be permanent.
I've racked up a couple thousand dollars in medical bills already from this side effect, and it was a pain to get doctors to admit it happened until I went to a major university hospital. At that hospital they diagnosed me right away and basically said I'd have to wait it out.
If you are curious, basically I couldn't walk for over a week, terrible joint pain for months along with numbness in my hands, face, and body. Its a known side effect with this class. Rare, but known.
And I don't want them caving into "big infomercial" sleazeballs that tell use phrases like "Big Pharma" to try and persuade potential customers to buy their scientifically unproven snake oil instead.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You don't opt out. You have to sign up and opt in for them to get your records.
I agree 100% with GP. I even wrote Google to that effect. Not that I expect them to do anything with my feedback other than send it to the bitbucket.
This is a horrible, horrible precedent to set, allowing a 3rd party to have access to people's medical records without any protection under the law.
HIPPA *does* need to be updated, immediately, to cover online databases.
6. If it's free, how does Google make money off Google Health?
Much like other Google products we offer, Google Health is free to anyone who uses it. There are no ads in Google Health. Our primary focus is providing a good user experience and meeting our users' needs.
I've heard enough. I don't know what their long-term plan for monetizing Google Health is, and I don't really care now. I don't trust Google enough to consider even for a second entrusting my health care information to them (and I say this as someone who has thought very highly of the company since the beginning). And their weasly answer to the obvious question above, I think, justifies my mistrust.
Every for-profit company's primary focus is - making a profit. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with this, and the ideal situation arises when "providing a good user experience and meeting [...] users' needs" is aligned with the profit motive.
So why they can't be honest about their motivations in undertaking an expensive, large-scale project like this -- whatever those motivations are -- instead of trying to make us believe that they're doing it "out of the goodness of their hearts?" All their mealy-mouthedness accomplishes is to raise the suspicion that they've got something nasty up their sleeves. And that ensures that many users, including me, will never entrust their most private of private data to Google.
In other words, if you are in their State, you have to follow their rules, and their rules say your price isn't affected by "condition y".
On a related note, I read an article stating that part of a McCain proposal would allow insurance companies to change their legal residency for the purpose of using another State's insurance rules. In other words, a New York insurance company can pay taxes in Arizona and use their insurance rules.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Thats the service I want to see offered. With the posting of photos and movie clips allowed. They can build a virtual community of porno providers and consumers. Wait- thats YouTube.
Your medical provider is covered by HIPPA and CANNOT release your records to a third party without your consent. When you go to a new doctor they generally make you sign something saying they can share it with your insurance company, who also cannot share it with Google without your consent.
The way Google Health works is you give them your data and they store it.
I had a cold, had some herbal medicine, a few days later my cold was gone. Explain that!
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
These documents and subdocuments are so full of weasel words, Google could practically do anything they want. Example:
However, Google may only use health information you provide as permitted by the Google Health Privacy Policy, your Sharing Authorization, and applicable law.
"YOU did not provide this information. Your doctor's office provided the information, so it is exempt from these policies."
See? It took me just a quick glance to find a huge conditional that is subject to interpretation. Don't think that companies wouldn't make that argument. And Google does not have an "evil policy", so we don't have a "promise" that they'll not interpret things in a manner we didn't expect.
And that was just one example.
Remember that social site that fooled you to get your gmail account and password so you can "invite" all your friends? Remember that someone told you not to do so because is wasn't safe to make your password public but you didn't listen?
Well, now you just got a shinny new Penile Prosthesis Insertion - Non-inflatable AND a Penile Prosthesis Insertion- Inflatable.
Have a nice day.
Maybe patients can bolster privacy by inserting legal terms of access (like an end-user license agreement) into the content of their electronic medical records. The idea is not legal advice, just something to think about. --Ben -- Sample terms for public discussion: http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/02/some-fear-law-will-not-accord-adequate.html
Benjamin Wright, Dallas, Texas, benjaminwright.us
I was about to say "Geez, can't take a joke?" but then I noticed you're sitting at +5 Insightful, so you must not be alone.
:wq
Your sense of humor called, it's enjoying palm beach with the kids.
It would be nice if they provided a way to export my health information to their CCR/G format so I could save it locally.
I also find it interesting that they are ready, willing and able to share my information with anyone THEY chose.
From the Agreement:
'11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this licence shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licence.'
This along with the obvious lack of standardized vocabulary use in their user input choices; i.e. two separate yellow fever vaccines just because of a misspelling, doesn't give me a "warm fuzzy" feeling about putting any REAL Personal Health Information (PHI) on their site.
I get the impression that they have decided that they know all about IT design and failed to learn from the many years of research that has gone into the complexities of healthcare information systems.
After [Queensland] Australia's & other "Doctor Death" tragedies (in which doctors' many errors have left patients much worse off, or dead...) and other situations, in which doctors sexually abuse or just undulu fondle patients, as part of their "treatment" - a partly public online data base might be just what we need to help find & eradicate "bad" medical professionals.
...ie, to see if practitioners and/or hospitals need retraining or further investigation.
;-)
Let Google Health be modified to compile results of medical procedures - by the practitioner(s), who perform them - and compare longer-term performance with expected failure & complication rates across the hospital...
and then compare each hospital's rates to "best practice" -
We could also get very useful (even valuable) data on risks of working / living in certain areas, eg, by post code... if correlations between location and diseases are available to all via Google Health.
Mapping sources of pollutions & overlaying incidence rate contour lines onto the same maps, might affect property prices... giving folks another [if economic] reason to cleanup the mess before people would move to a new development/location.
Gov't-held data is already held & analyzed, around the world, to support such analyses; eg:
While in South Australia, attending a Data Mining seminar (atop the EDS building in Adelaide), I heard some public sector IT managers report how Data Mining - even in -existing- Public Health Service databases - showed useful patterns of disease occuramces vs postcode...
but another public sector IT manager was quick to poit out that such results would not be made known to members of the public.
(Tell me: Does this kind of data hiding happen in such places as Sweden? I hope not... but give me the facts & some URLs where they are available; yes, some of us read Swedish here...
If you're a higher risk, you have to provide a higher reward to the company in order to be accepted. Your higher risk is only offset to a degree by their lower risk, and if they know up-front that you're a higher risk there's no reason not to take that into account ahead of time.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."