Slashdot Mirror
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 private company should be so entrenched in society that it would be impossible to survive without the service they provide. If I can't get a job without a Google Health "badge", then something somewhere has gone horribly wrong.
This is already a big problem with credit companies becoming so pervasive. It's also bad enough that private companies are leading the American military around by the nose. But that pales in comparison to the actual, direct, and personal limits imposed by something like the system the article is talking about.
But that doesn't mean they're good. Diet monitoring? Try this, or any other free web service that does it *without* needing your medical history. Fitness Monitoring? Doesn't Wii Fit do this? How about a simple spreadsheet? Travel? Is it that hard to look at The Weather Channel before you leave?
Honestly, this just sounds like candy-coating a terrible idea so that people will buy into it. None of the ideas on that page are lacking a non-Google implementation assuming you're not too lazy to do some footwork.
Then again, if you are too lazy, maybe whatever ill effects you receive from using Google's service are deserved...
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Unless this is mandated by somebody or other, you're free to post or not post whatever you want on Google health.
That's fine, but it does severely limit the usefulness of the product. As a physician, I'm not going to be inclined to spend much time looking at a highly edited version of somebody's medical history. There is a reason we ask for records from doctors or hospitals. It's far too easy to simply edit out the uncomfortable bits of your life. That of course, is perfectly within your rights, but my job is too look at the whole history, not bits and pieces.
I don't see this as taking off much in the professional sector - it may be popular in the direct-to-consumer advertising space (which is why I cynically suspect it exists), but it's too limited to be much use professionally. Not useless, but very limited.
The truly scary part is that the "10 worst" scenarios are much more likely to come true that the "10 best".
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The thing about health is -- it's not always your damn fault if you fall ill. You'll understand when you get cancer, even if you had had a "healthy lifestyle" beforehand. You just can't control everything that has an impact on your health.
Also, sometimes bad health has nothing to do with having an unhealthy lifestyle. It seems to me that "giving an obvious economic incentive to become healthier" will also have the unintended consequence of economically punishing people who got an unlucky roll of the genetic dice.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Or go to work for a drug company, or a healthcare provider. They see an economic incentive in keeping people in poor health.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
As someone who deals with paper medical records all day, I welcome standardized electronic medical records. Not only would e-records be portable, they would also allow for greater continuity of care between healthcare providers. Obviously, security is an issue and I'd like to see more measures taken to ensure that our medical records are protected. As for the possibility of these records raising insurance premiums I think the best way around this is to create a national healthcare plan. I would think that in countries where there is national healthcare services, electronic medical records would be of great benefit since it's inevitable that such a large beaucratic undertaking would need centralized patient information. I would take issue with basing rates on people with healthier lifestyles. There are many in this country that aren't living healther lifestyles due to socio-economic factors. People that live in in poorer areas don't always have access to proper healthcare, are often not educated in the ways of maintaining health and don't have access to nutritional foods.
What's next? Only approved food may be sold? Perhaps any non-vegan food is subject to confiscation and the owners subject to arrest?
Maybe we can ban alcohol nationally, since that worked so well last time.
Oh, I know. Mandatory exercise. Not running fast enough? Well, attack dogs are cheaper that what you're costing medicare, so enough with your rights.
The idea the economics of health care must trump individual rights leads to complete regulation and control of everyone's lives as a "cost saving measure". It's totalitarianism.
But I suspect you know that, since your sig line seems to indicate you're trolling.. if so, well done.
A Human Right
You think? Hmmm. How about someone in government realizes that AIDS costs the public treasury a huge amount of money, so they start penalizing a gay lifestyle? Or being unmarried, which shortens up your life? Or amusing yourself rock-climbing or bicycle racing, which are more dangerous than going to the gym and riding a stationary bicycle to nowhere?
More plausibly, how about someone in government thinks that lifestyle X is bad for you, and starts handing out tax penalties and rebates accordingly -- but he's wrong. Not like we've ever had any health fads that turned out to be nonsense, right? And no government bureaucrat would dream of making decisions when he doesn't really have enough information to make a good one, right?
You're thinking that it takes a physician the same time to read through your history and pluck out the important stuff that it would take you, a complete amateur with nearly zero understanding of how medicine works.
That's as logical as thinking that it would take Linus Torvalds as long to understand a kernel patch as J. Random User who's never coded a line in his life. Or that your car mechanic needs to carefully listen to every sound your jalopy makes to know whether it needs a valve job. Or that the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic would have to get out a tuning fork and go carefully around to listen to each of his 150 musicians to know whether the orchestra is playing in tune.
"Seems like a win-win to me."
As long as you are on the enforcement end, and not on the end being forced to give up all of your rights as a rational being, everything will always look win-win.
I'm in Alaska, come up and visit. Bring your harpoon....
"Taking the time to read your entire medical history" may or may not be particularly relevant. If you are young and healthy without significant ongoing issues, it may be perfectly unnecessary. I likely don't care about the details of your tonsilectomy at age 6 (I might, however, if you had a significant anesthetic reaction).
But you bring up a good point that's generally obfuscated in these debates: You may not want every detail of a person's medical history at any given time. Sometimes you do. Having to wade through tons of extraneous detail makes it easy to miss important tidbits. Getting a 200 page printout from a 6 day hospitalization with everything including the janitor's notes doesn't help me much. Putting that in machine readable format helps me maybe a bit. What we don't have is an underlying, consistent framework for electronic medical records that's used by everyone and has the capability to organize a huge amount of information into a generally usable format.
There are baby steps out there, but it's a huge chicken and egg problem for the field. I personally see the digitalization of medical records happening *very* slowly - over the next 20 years or so. And that's a feature, not a bug folks. There are absolutely huge societal issues to be dealt with before we give some uber-governmental department the holy grail of databases. I'd rather have the current fragmented system then allow every government and corporate entity start data mining for whatever purpose of the week they feel important (or profitable).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Romeo and Juliet share STD data. They are both clean (or so the record says). Great. They can now enjoy sex with each other.
Then, over time, they decide that this relationship is really a great thing and they want to start looking into marriage. They get married. Everybody is happy.
Now that they're married (because nobody would be stupid enough to share this type of data BEFORE marriage...would they?), they share their genetic information with each other as they are talking about children. But, what's this?! Juliet sees that Romeo has a high propensity for Down Syndrome (or any other "disease" - take your pick). Well, this isn't good.
So, instead, Juliet decides to get a divorce and go on her merry way.
The End
Don't forget that it has to use the Wisdom of Clowns.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Is it just me, or do teh best and worst cases seem almost identical?
Take the sex examples:
Best Possible Thing - Romeo and Juliet share STD information after getting to know each other, before having sex.
Worst Possible Thing - Lonesone Larry freely decides to share his STD information with prospective dates.
There isn't that much difference. And while we might think Larry's decision is stupid, he might have a good reason for it.
The same goes for some of the other issues.
The same as web 2.0, which is the same as web 1.0 was. It's yuppie buzztalk for the clueless by people who miss the dotcom bubble.
Web 1.0 was "It's a series of tubes."
Web 2.0 is "It's a cloud."
Web 3.0 will be "It's pixie dust and fairie magic".
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest