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.
Google Health, Mayer said, represents a "large ongoing
initiative" by the company, which she said she hoped would
eventually include "thousands of partners and millions of users."
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