John Battelle's Searchblog

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful.

Um, no. Google's overall mission is to organize the world's information. Patient information is but a small part of the overall world's information. Patient information is also but a small part of the overall medical world's information.

Call me wrong-headed, but I think this offering is pointing the barrel of the gun in the wrong direction. When I think about my overall information needs, my overall pain points (pun not intended) when dealing with the medical world, I do not have any pressing, real need to organize and/or search my own medical records. What I do need, on the other hand, is to be able to organize information about the doctors and hospitals at which I am receiving treatments. I want to know what a particular doctor's surgical record is. I want to know how many wrongful deaths may have occurred at a particular hospital, due to unsanitary procedures and post-surgical infections. I want to know how my doctor ranks, nationwide, in her or his particular specialty. I want to click on a doctor, and do a query that says "find similar", to find other doctors with similar specialties. And I want that information to be tied into my HMO or PPO coverage, so that I know which doctors are in-network and which are not.

That's the Google Health that would be useful to me, as a user. That's the "world's information" that I would like to see organized. My own medical records? Pshaw. I see no compelling reason for that to be stored in the cloud. Give me a USB key fob, or a desktop application that connects to the doctor's office via TCP/IP directly. I see no reason for Google to be the middleman in that particular data transaction.

But the other stuff.. the "vendor relationship management" tools for assisting me in doctors and hospital selection.. that's the stuff that would actually be useful.

But it ain't what Google is doing. I am not impressed.

Quick follow up to my previous post:

With the exception of filtering my doctor searches by my HMO or PPO, there is nothing that Google actually needs to have of my own personal medical information in order for me to do any of these searches. Google can focus on organizing the medical world's information without absolutely needing my (or your) personal details.

If I do have a specific question, say for some particular treatment or procedure or ailment, then I should just be able to query Google Health directly, on that one particular topic. Google does not need to have access to all my records in order to make that query. I can just query on that topic, directly. Does Google not realize that? Time to start hiring more PhDs again or something, so they can figure that out. Sheesh.

I couldn't agree with you more on this. Google health should be about helping me research my condition, who's best to deal with that condition, what treatments are available, etc. Could this be why Adam Bosworth left and started Keas?

"What is the Keas vision? If you are one of the many at risk of losing your health, Keas will help you keep healthy. If you’re recovering from an illness Keas will help you to recover and stay well. If you suffer from a chronic disease Keas will help you be as well as you can be. Today no one helps you. You can’t assemble your health data to get the best care possible. Even if you can, your doctors rarely help because the system doesn’t pay them to keep you healthy. You don’t have tools that work online to help in these situations, partly because insurance doesn’t pay for them. Because of these problems people suffer both personal hardship and fear and economic deprivation, sometimes irreversibly. What is more we all pay enormous medical costs for this, and there are costs to society and to the competitiveness of our companies in lost productivity. It is our mission at Keas to fix this for you. Clearly it isn’t an easy mission or a short-term one. While we think we have some great ideas about how to make this possible, we have a lot to learn in the course of this adventure."
http://adambosworth.net/2007/12/22/talking-about-keas/

If you look at the first post Bosworth made on the Google Blog it seems he had diggerent ideas than what Google Health is.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/health-care-information-matters.html

I guess eventually, Google and MS going to collect all US citizen medical records.

Google/MS must provide separate userid’s for the login (random id like – 1243et4323e1). They should not use same google/live id’s. and must have to enforce strict password policy. All the medical records must be encrypted. https is NOT enough.

beta apps for medical records? hmmmmm

anyways, if they don't provide best possible security. One way or other, bad people can get more powerful weapons. 10x powerful than nuclear….
how? Either they try to bribe, or force MS/G employees to get the medical records…what they can do with it?
here is the one possibility…they could sort it out all heart patients and kill them by making phone calls… there are more better and easier ways than this, but I don’t like to disclose.

Goggle has done for information what Walmart has done for retail. With enormous amounts information comes enormous amounts of mis-information. This is specially true in health care. Having a trusted source such as Goggle deciphering the information and presenting it in a relevant way may finally help Americans get healthy. Like a Goggle map for driving directions this collection of health information may help keep people's health compass pointing in the right direction.

Goggle has done for information what Walmart has done for retail. With enormous amounts information comes enormous amounts of mis-information. This is specially true in health care. Having a trusted source such as Goggle deciphering the information and presenting it in a relevant way may finally help Americans get healthy. Like a Goggle map for driving directions this collection of health information may help keep people's health compass pointing in the right direction.

Wow, Errol, excellent point. I went back and read the Bosworth post from two years ago that you mention. Look what he writes:

People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all. Which happens to be our mission.

What a completely different vision from today's post! Two years ago, Bosworth talks about "medical information that is out there" which is to be "organized" and "made accessible to all". Today, they say:

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful.

I wonder why they abandoned their former vision?

beta apps for medical records? hmmmmm

Actually, Saran, this is a good point, too. Google's core corporate philosophy, their dogma and religion even, is to release early, get user feedback, and then iteratively improve the product. Gmail's Paul Buchheit has as recent post on this:

"For web based products at least, there's another very powerful technique: release early and iterate. The sooner you can start testing your ideas, the sooner you can start fixing them."

This dogma scares me to the extreme when I think about my health records online. To think that Google is going to release an early version of this Google Health web-based product, a beta, and then let feedback from the users be the guiding force for plugging whatever holes exist in the product is not something that inspires a lot of confidence and security.

JG,
IMO, I would like to see the final health application to users, not experiemntal beta apps.

Google if you really confident, you can do the experiments with your employees first! Don’t they have medical records?

I thought, human cloning is prohibited one, but Google is digitally cloning every one and ranking it. (Google is already collecting DNA data).

Communities should demand for more security. why? Money making machines have been outsourcing security concerns to government. later they claim that its free service!!