The Google empire continues to thrust its way forward into unchartered territories and brave new innovation. Their latest venture is Google Health, a free repository for patients to store and manage health information in one place, accessible via an internet browser. They also claim it is secure and they won’t sell any information to third parties.
There are a number of other big companies working hard to get into this space in the last web 2.0 health environment. Microsoft last year released a product called HealthVault, another product designed to put the patient “in control of their health information”. Each corporation is teaming up with a number of medical industry companies to allow records to seamlessly flow through the internet ether and be sucked into a centralised health record.
According to Lynne Dunbrack, program director at Health Industry Insights, currently less than 3% of consumers have adopted personal e-health records in the US. She also added in a recent interview that there is currently not enough electronic data to populate these personal e-health records so Google and Microsoft are obviously banking on a significant growth in this sector. Or perhaps they are merely racing against each other chasing a trophy that doesn’t exist.
So is the UK’s version of patient electronic records any better? We certainly have a different stance on this side of the pond, with Connecting for Health requiring opt-out rather than voluntary opt-in. Also our system is Government driven and funded using tax payers money. However, if the spine hits further problems in the future, could we see it sold off to Google or Microsoft to take on and run? I bet they are carefully watching what happens over here with their Googley radars.