Institute For The Future

To your health! Google!

For several months now, there has been a buzz in the blogosphere about Google getting into the health space. It started heating up last December, with a post from Adam Bosworth, a Google Vice President, on the company's official blog. Bosworth observed that people need greater access to reliable health information in general, and to their personal health records in particular. A week later, Bosworth spoke at a conference called "Connecting Americans to their Health Care," and posted a link to his speech:

Let's put the patients in charge of their health and medical information. Let's build a system which puts the people who are sick in control. For every single medical and health-related event, let's make sure that patients can effortlessly retrieve and share their information in its totality and then use it to ensure that they get the best quality of care possible. It is their health.

Last week, Vince Kuraitis posted a detailed analysis on his e-CareManagement blog about how Google Health will radically reform health care with its foray into personal health records (PHRs). It is long, but well worth the read.

 

In the mean time, earlier last week, Roni Zeiger, a doctor who is part of Bosworth's health team at Google, posted an essay that emphasized Google's concern about patients having access to guidelines for standards of care. He made it very clear that Google is working on a project that would help individuals determine if they are getting the best possible medical care. He echoed an earlier post by Bosworth on the subject, which acknowledged that searching can find a great deal of relevant information, but that it can be challenging to sort through it all to determine which links are more reliable than others. Zeiger seems to be hinting at a plan to provide customized access to medical expertise that traditionally only doctors have been privy to.

We have been talking to many medical experts to understand what the best guidelines are, and how we can determine which ones apply in different circumstances. If such guidelines were more available to patients, they might be able to, by inputting information such as age, gender or medications, learn about recommended screening tests and other preventive measures, or about harmful drug interactions.

Although Google has yet to launch any of these new initiatives, it sounds like Google Health's plans coincide with one of the trends we identified in our Global Health Economy Map of the Decade 2006-2016--Do-It-Yourself Health. Whether by choice or by force, people will take increasing responsibility for managing their health. Having complete access to and control over their PHRs is a huge step in that direction. Empowering patients with expert information about their health issues is another step along the way.