Google's Site For Medical Records Maintenance

Google Inc. yesterday unveiled its highly-anticipated Health product, which is designed to let users upload and store medical records from various sources and get significant health information.

Announced almost a year-and-a-half back, the search giant hopes that google.com/health will become the central place where users organize their health information and share it with people or services worth trusting.

"Patients need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily," said Adam Bosworth in November 2006.

The company has teamed up with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and CVS Caremark of Woonsocket, R.I., the Cleveland Clinic, Longs Drug Stores, Medco, and Walgreens Pharmacy. Google intends to sign up more partners, so as to ensure that its users have the broadest possible access to medical information, it said.

Google’s latest offering will enable users to enter their personal medical records on the web with individual password protection, so that they can view the information from any geographic location.

Such access would be especially of use if, a patient becomes ill or is injured far from his or her primary care physician.

"We believe that patients should be the stewards of their own data," said Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess, in a statement.

"Our vision is that [Beth Israel] patients will be able to electronically upload their diagnosis lists, medication lists and allergy lists, in a Google Health account and share that information with healthcare providers who currently don't have access to Beth Israel's proprietary site.” Halamka said.

Concerns over patients’ privacy were ignited shortly after the launch of Google’s health product. In response, Google said that users’ privacy is an important factor and it is taken care of. All the information entered by a patient is directly under his own control and only he decides who can access the records

Also, Google had ensured back in March, that the information will not be used for commercial purposes.

“Health information is very fragmented today and we think we can help. Google believes the Internet can help users get access to their health information and help people make more empowered and informed health decisions. People already come to Google to search for health information, so we are a natural starting point,” said Google.

Chief rival Microsoft already has a similar service, called the HealthVault, which was launched in October last year, with the aim of providing a better health management system to people.