Google is always coming up with new products and services to take advantage of the massive amounts of information it holds. Google Health is a new format that seeks to aggregate a person's medical history into an online format. According to the Google site,
"Google Health puts you in charge of your health information. It's safe, secure, and free.
- Organize your health information all in one place
- Gather your medical records from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies
- Keep your doctors up-to-date about your health
- Be more informed about important health issues"
Many in the health care industry are calling for records to migrate into an electronic format to improve the communication between doctors, lower the risk of patients mixing medications they shouldn't, and speed up the access one's medical history in case of emergency. While I'm sure there are a number of companies dedicated to this initiative, it is interesting to see the way Google has entered the space and is positioning the service as one to benefit the patients rather than the doctors. It will also be interesting to see what level of resistance there is to online records due to the risk of privacy and security.
- Jennifer Rogers
Google in Healthcare huh? So I need to chime in here because this is one of my favorite topics.
ReplyDeleteSee I worked on Microsoft's competing initiative, Microsoft HealthVault this summer and I am also going to be on HealthVault's full-time staff come July.
I will try to be as diplomatic as possible here, although I must say it does get extremely frustrating to always here about what Google is doing and the rest of the market often gets ignored (I get it, Google is cool and interesting and new industries for them is always newsworthy).
Google's biggest problem in this space is that it is probably the first initiative that does not really fit into their business model. As of now, Google is saying they will not use personal healthcare data to target advertising but their stance on privacy has been very soft and the thinking is they may change their mind on this soon enough.
If privacy wasn't an issue they would look at information in your Google Health account and target ads and information to you based on that data. Ok..so as long as they do not share that data with 3rd parties that may not be a direct envasion of privacy standards, but do people want to really see ads about Diabetes if Google health knows that the blood sugar measurement in your last MD's visit wasn't looking so good? Google can probably also better serve the advertising needs of the physician and hospital markets through this Google Health Initiative.
Ads based on web history is envasive enough, Ads based on health history is probably crossing the line for some.
Microsoft, Intel and other organizations aren't as dependent on this advertising monetization model. MSFT for example makes there money largely from software and licensing so based on their relationships with hospitals and providers around the world it shouldn't be hard to monetize. Intel on the other hand is a hardware company which is betting heavy on a growing market for home health monitoring and data exchange (hardware dependent markets).
Google has not said publicy what kind of resources they are dedicating to this effort (some speculate it is just someones pet project), but MSFT and Intel have staffs of over 100 individuals working on these inititiaves.
Regardless, when Google gets into anything things get interesting...