Google offers online personal health records

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Google offers online personal health records

By Steve Lohr
International Herald Tribune

After a year and half of development, Google has begun offering online personal health records to the public.
The service, Google Health, at Google.com/health, is the latest entrant in the growing field of companies' offering personal health records on the Web. Their ranks range from longtime online health services like WebMD to Revolution Health, a start-up, and Microsoft.
The companies all hope to capitalize eventually on the trend of increasing searches for health information online and on the potential of Internet tools to help consumers manage their own health care and medical spending.
Google entered the field of personal health records Monday with a leading online brand, deep pockets and a wealth of technical skills. In a two-month trial this year, the Cleveland Clinic found that its patients were eager to use the Google health records.
The pilot project, limited to 1,600 patients, was quickly oversubscribed, said C. Martin Harris, a spokesman for the Cleveland Clinic. Harris also said that when the clinic's online health records, introduced in 2004, were linked to the Google record, the clinic's records were used more frequently by patients. "It positioned our personal health record more into an activity that they use every day," Harris said.
The Google record, he said, allows the user to send personal information, at the individual's discretion, into the clinic record or to pull information from the clinic records into the Google personal file.
The ability of patients to send information, in particular, can be helpful to clinic doctors, Harris said. For example, if a person sees specialists outside the clinic and receives a drug prescription from an outside doctor, it raises the risk of harmful drug interactions.
"Until now, if a patient doesn't remember to tell me," he said, "I don't know about drugs prescribed outside the Cleveland Clinic system."
In the Cleveland trial, patients apparently did not shun the Google health records because of qualms that their personal health information might not be secure if held by a large technology company.
In Google Health, as in the pilot project, the company is not selling advertisements. And what information is shared with doctors, clinics or pharmacies is controlled by the individual, said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search products.
More than two dozen companies and institutions have announced that they are partners with Google Health. They include the drugstore chains Walgreens and CVS, the American Heart Association, the medical laboratory chain Quest Diagnostics, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic.
The partnerships are not exclusive arrangements. The Cleveland Clinic, for example, is also talking to Microsoft. "As these online services become available, we expect to connect to them all," Harris said.