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Jul. 17, 2007 at 9:11am Eastern by Barry Schwartz
Google Health To Create The Personal Health Record?
Taking the temperature on Google Health from News.com has Vince Kuraitis, principal and founder of healthcare consultants Better Health Technologies, predicting that Google will develop a personal health record.
Right now, health records for an individual reside in many locations and it is rare for the patient to know all his or her historical medical information. Kuraitis believes that Google's Adam Bosworth, is working to create a web-based location where patients "own their personal health data." They can then share that information via the web to those that they trust and have confidence in.
Of course, this leads to major privacy concerns. But I for one, would love to have a centralized location to see all my past medical records and chart them over time. I know there have been companies that offer this, but typically they are for larger organizations under specified medical plans and not a global repository.
Postscript From Danny: After Bosworth was hired by Google, rumors sparked in March 2006 that Google was going to create personal health recording like this. However, in May 2006, the big "health announcement" that Google promised turned out to be the less than thrilling health topical links powered by Google Coop. After that in July 2006, news (and see here) that a Google Health Scrapbook was being developed came out. There have been various rumors since then, and I believe Google itself has even expressed directly and publicly a desire to do the type of personal health recording that's being speculated at. I'll try to dig up a reference to that in the future. However, the company's sure taking its time getting there.
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By Barry Schwartz
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I'm skeptical.
This sounds like something that's made-for-hype.
Health records have MAJOR MAJOR legal hassles involved with them, and large liabilities. As well as enormous turf-wars from the various insurance companies. That's *why* there is no global repository.
The only way there will be a central repository in the US is if the US government mandates it. Which I think is very unlikely.