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Google Health Open Platform Is Great — Or Awful
JackPowers writes "The Google Health APIs enable portable, standardized, open architecture, extensible personal health records, which is nice but boring if they're just used to manage the paperwork of the doctor/patient relationship. But once the data is set free, all kinds of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 apps are possible. This article looks ahead 10 years at Best Case Scenarios. A follow-up article lists the Worst Case Scenarios."
No ambulance in the world is going to give you an antibiotic. They're going to wait until they get to the ER and let the doc decide. Even if I, for some reason, decide that I'm giving you a drug you subsequently decide to have an anaphylactic reaction to it, well, that's why I have steroids and endotracheal tubes. If you're that sick we ask you the AMPLE history (Allergies, Medications, Past (Medical History), Last Meal, Event. If we can't get it out of you, well, then your likely sick enough to be run through some rather standardized stabilization protocols until we figure out just what you manage to do to yourself. Usually, it's readily apparent. If it's really complicated, it's likely that you are stable enough for the docs and staff to work through the problem bit by bit.
Yes, rapid access to medical information can be important and very occasionally life saving (but likely not). But Google Health isn't going to work for this. If you are unfortunate to have a serious medical condition, a small laminated paper with your doctor's name, brief past history, medication and allergies and maybe an old EKG shrunk down would do wonders. Stick in in your wallet. We always check that looking for cash, checks and your insurance card....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We already have HL7. Providers have the ability to exchange and consolidate your medical records directly and to provide electronic copies for the patient to physically retain to personally bring by sneakernet between their providers without the need for a proxy. The vast majority of people don't have that many medical providers, nor do they change them very often. It is neither necessary nor desirable to have a company like Google aggregate the records. Its only strength is in being the *only* repository, which is its greatest weakness as a single point of failure. If there are multiple companies like Google providing the service, how is that terribly different than polling the providers directly? Central clearinghouses might be useful, a la the credit reporting agencies. When someone has records on you, they publish that fact without publishing the actual records. So, in an emergency situation, a provider could ask the question "where does this person have records" and then proceed to retrieve them with proper clinical discretion on both ends.
Apparently it is living longer that costs more to society. Prevention No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure
See: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa
Centralizing that information takes away control from us as individuals.
I specifically stated that your medical records themselves would not be centralized and that your consent to release would be required and would further fall under the clinical discretion of each of your medical providers.
The only thing I was suggesting is that for emergency purposes, it would be possible to quickly locate records sources that you have explicitly authorized. Whether or not any particular situation meets your consent requirements to actually release the records is a totally different story, which was the whole point you so cleverly failed to understand.
A lot of people go get mental health care and pay out of their own pocket so that it isn't 'in the system'.
Your method of payment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your medical records and how they may -- or even MUST, with or without your consent (See: http://www.cdc.gov/ncphi/disss/nndss/PHS/infdis.htm ) -- be legally be released.
Sure, you can choose to go to witch doctors who keep no records to "stay off the grid." So what? Since the whole point of my post was "consent," what's your point? "I'm a super-secret rebel and I don't leave a paper trail?" Well, good for you, but what does that have to do with a single word of what I said?