Today's focus: Google Health

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

Google never fails to surprise. It's the scope and scale of their ambitions that impresses me ranging as they do from relatively simple applications that are just way cool such as Sky Map, through their Chrome Web browser (which is now looking pretty stable), to the subject of this newsletter: Google Health.

Google Health, which was launched as a beta (of course) in spring 2008, is a free repository for your personal health information. Using the service you can create online health profiles for yourself, family members or others you care for (these profiles can include health conditions, medications, allergies and lab results), you can import medical records from hospitals and pharmacies, share your health records with "your care network" (which may include family members, friends and doctors), and browse an online health services directory to find services that are integrated with Google Health.

After you sign up you can import your medical records from Allscripts, Anvita Health, The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, The Cleveland Clinic, CVS Caremark, Healthgrades, Longs Drugs, Medco Health Solutions, Quest Diagnostics, RxAmerica and Walgreens.

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Google never fails to surprise. It's the scope and scale of their ambitions that impresses me ranging as they do from relatively simple applications that are just way cool such as Sky Map, through their Chrome Web browser (which is now looking pretty stable), to the subject of this newsletter: Google Health.

Google Health, which was launched as a beta (of course) in spring 2008, is a free repository for your personal health information. Using the service you can create online health profiles for yourself, family members or others you care for (these profiles can include health conditions, medications, allergies and lab results), you can import medical records from hospitals and pharmacies, share your health records with "your care network" (which may include family members, friends and doctors), and browse an online health services directory to find services that are integrated with Google Health.

After you sign up you can import your medical records from Allscripts, Anvita Health, The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, The Cleveland Clinic, CVS Caremark, Healthgrades, Longs Drugs, Medco Health Solutions, Quest Diagnostics, RxAmerica and Walgreens.

What you'll wind up with if you update all of the sections is a pretty complete health profile, which means that privacy has to be a concern. Interestingly, because becoming a subscriber is voluntary it appears that the service is exempt from the provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

This in turn means that many of the management constraints that doctors, pharmacies, and other health providers and services have when dealing with patient data don't apply to Google and therefore consumers using the service have potentially less recourse if they should ever feel that Google has violated their privacy. Whether this latter issue affects the service's viability remains to be seen.

Google Health is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it is from Google which, it is needless to say, carries a lot of marketing weight so as and when the company decides to litter the service with advertising the potential revenue could be significant.

Second, Google could achieve what the government has only dreamed about so far … universally available and portable health records. If healthcare providers take the service seriously Google could be the de facto and therefore dominant player quickly eclipsing Microsoft's HealthVault and the Indivo project (an open-source project managed by the Children's Hospital Informatics Program).

Google Health provides an API based on a subset of the "Continuity of Care Record" API described as "a standarad format for transferring snapshots of a patient's medical history." This API allows developers to build software that can create and read consumer's medical records with sophisticated authorization and access controls.

This is a market that is going to grow quickly over the next couple of years and there will be a tremendous land rush by software developers. If I were a VC or other investor looking to catch the next serious market wave the health care records business could be a big one. Moreover, betting on Google taking a prime or even the prime position as the underlying engine that drives the market should be a pretty safe bet.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.