Google Details Health Records System

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has offered a first glance at Google Health, the Internet giant's initiative to make health records portable...and in patients' control.

At a closing keynote at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMMS) conference in Orlando, Florida, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave the first public preview of Google Health, and outlined how Google envisions the system making patients’ medical records and health information easily portable between doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, andother health care providers, while at the same time preserving patients’ privacy and enabling them to have complete control over their medical information. He also said Google Health won’t offer up ads; instead, Google wants to make money on the service by using it to drive traffic to its existing search offerings.

Google Health is not yet available publicly, and likely won’t be widely available for a few months. Google announced last week it is conducting a trial with the Cleveland Clinic to test the system. Schmidt also announced Google has signed deals with a number of hospitals and health care companies to support the service, including Quest Diagnostics, health insurance provider Aetna, Walgreens, and (significantly) Wal-Mart pharmacies.

Schmidt emphasized that the system will not share data without a user’s consent, and users would access the system with a username and password from any Internet-enabled computer. Google has also summarized the main features of Google Health in its official blog.

Google faces competition in the health records arena from Microsoft’s HealthVault initiative, announced last October, along with Revolution Health, a similar service backed by AOL founder Steve Case.

Industry watchers have flagged all these online health records systems as having serious privacy concerns: in addition to potentially serious ramifications if the system were to be breached or grant unauthorized access to health information, information stored in such systems would not be protected by the 1996 HIPAA act, which requires patents receive notification if their records are subpoenaed, along with other protections. Exclusion from provisions of the HIPAA act means, potentially, information stored in online health records systems could legally be used for marketing and other purposes without users’ knowledge or consent.