Google Health: it will be Big

The much talked about Google Health, whatever it is, whenever it comes, will be big news for healthcare.

Google VP Adam Bosworth has recently begun posting on this issue and has presented his ideas at a recent Conference. He wants patients to be able to create their own "health URL"
("...an online meeting place where their caregivers — with express permission from the ill person — can come together, pass on notes to each other, review each other’s notes, look at the medical data, and suggest courses of action. This isn’t rocket science. It is online web applications 101"), as a building block of a plattform that interconnects patients and providers.

The concept surely needs some refinement and there are significant regulatory issues that need to be addressed. I believe they still don´t know exactly what they want to do in this area, they are just testing the waters. But the idea is powerful. In its simplicity lies its revolutionary potential. And the company behind it has all the credibility and a proven track-record of tackling complex problems with simple, user-friendly solutions.

Healthcare is an information-based industry that, increadibly, is light-years behind other industries in the use of information technology. Even today, most information is kept in disconnected silos. Change, if it is to happen, will come from a combination of initiatives aimed at pushing the widespread use of electronic health records. Some will be top-down, such as Dossia, an online patient information system sponsored by big employers (WalMart among them) planned to launch next year. But the bottom-up movement by Google (getting patients to feel the need to own and manage their health information and providing them with the tools to do so) probably has a greater potential to be "the" breaking point: a "pull" tactic that, once the established base of users is large enough, may force other stakeholders (physicians, but also insurers and others) to jump into this new scenario.