Personal Electronic Health Records

Tuesday, October 23rd 2007
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Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum battling it out in the forum of electronic medical records. Just what we need.

Don’t Tell Me Balmer Isn’t An Evil Genius

It looks like Google is going to be setting up an online medical records service to compete with Microsoft’s new HealthVault.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Mayer outlined the ways in which the search giant plans to bring its immense data storage and organization capacities to the field of medical care and patient records. Google is already the starting point for a large majority of the health-related searches on the Web, she pointed out.

“If you look at health care, there’s already a huge user need, people are already using Google more than any other tool on the Web to find health information,” Mayer said. “And the health care industry generates a huge amount of information every year. It’s a natural core competency for us, to understand how to organize all that data.”

I’m actually all for these types of services and have only limited concerns about patient privacy. If patients fear for their privacy then they won’t use them; let the market sort it out. That being said, the Google exec could’ve been a little less blunt about the objectives…

“The goal for a lot of doctors is how many patients can they see in a day,” Mayer said. “That means their minutes per patient has got to go down, and the less time they have to spend finding and going over patient records the better. Ultimately we will design a product that’s useful for users, and also helps doctors do their job more quickly and more efficiently.”