Google: the Future of Patient Records?
Written June 18th, 2008 by Thomas AmesIt might be considered old news now, but Google and Cleveland Clinic have teamed up to provide patients’ health information through a secured Google account. After running a wildly successful patient portal with over 100,000 participants, this seems to bypass the hospital-specific portal and extend it to a patient’s private account. Is this the future of patient health information?
What we and our vendors might consider the newest and greatest technological innovation might already be in the past. The trendy keyword is “portal.” Patient portals, employee portals, physician portals, board member portals; I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a portal portal. But what Cleveland Clinic seems to be doing is taking the portal out of their hospital’s jurisdiction, and, instead, feeding it to a patient’s personal account.
I can’t seem to find a downside to this arrangement. A hospital simply creates a secure feed of information that is supplied through some sort of enrollment process initiated by the patient. The patient, instead of having to remember a million usernames and passwords, can simply find and download her information on to, say, an iGoogle homepage. There, she can manage his health records, correspond with the physician, track her at-home numbers (such as nutrition, weight, sugar levels, etc), which can then feed back in to the hospital for analysis.
While the project is still in pilot stage, it’s an incredibly interesting and logical concept and way to evolve patient health records. But are there any potential downsides?
June 19th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Do you trust Google with your personal health information? I’m not sure I do. My healthcare provider already has all of that information.
June 19th, 2008 at 11:05 am
I think enough people will trust and use Google … enough that it will become the standard and hospitals attempting to do the same will forever be in Google’s (and Microsoft’s and who knows who else) wake.
Why?
It’s free. It works. It’s easy and convenient. AND, it’s neutral … I can take my GoogleHealth PHR anywhere with me.
You have to hand it to Google … they’re good at building databases much in the same way as Honda is good at building motors. They saw an under-served need and provided a solution. Granted, at this point, the solution is very basic … but as it gains traction, and it will, it will set the standard whether we like it or not.
June 19th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I may add …
If there’s going to be a downside to this, it will be standardization.
It seems while most other industries have standardizes the records systems, the healthcare industry has some catching up to do. EMR, in particular, introduces standardization issues … in other words, EMR systems do not like to talk to each other very well.
How will Google accommodate this?
The likely answer will be that the hospitals will have to accommodate for Google … not the other way around. If Google gets all the customers, they hold the ultimate trump card. AND, I wouldn’t be surprised if some day hospitals are required (by CMS or Joint Commission, who knows) to provide patients EMR and PHR in a specific usable file format upon request.
However, file size of EMR can be enormous … especially for images. But for a patient, a low-resolution image may be all that’s needed. Personally, I think it would be cool to be able to keep a digital file copy of a maternity ultrasound of my kids.
Will Google be able to store (and transfer) that much information? Seems like if they can do it with YouTube, they’ll figure this out, too.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I don’t think that the presence of Google Health or Revolution Health will — at least for now — take the place of the “portals” being offered at the hospital. For example, we just rolled out MyChart (Cleveland Clinic is an Epic customer as well) and even if we did open a gateway to Google, I don’t think (I could be wrong) that all of the features in MyChart would be available through the Google interface. For example, I don’t think I’d be able to schedule an appointment through Google; I’d still need the Epic modules. …
Epic must have agreed to this pilot with CC and Google. But I wonder what their business strategy is? Are they willing to stop selling the patient and physician portal modules if Google takes hold? Or, is it a case that their modules will always have feature sets that are better?
June 20th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
This is a topic that I have covered in some entries in my blog, Five Years From Now (http://blogs.ecommunity.com/blog/fiveyearsfromnow/). I think that Google and the others won’t be able to connect back to the health care providers through secure messaging, etc and that will be a roadblock to adoption. Also, there are very few health care organizations that are linked to Google and very few consumers (about 4%) who will take the time to complete a PHR themselves.
I think these companies will serve as a health record portability function for consumers who change systems.
Also, Neal brings up another point we have considered that what entity will consumers trust to store their health information. A vendor, the government, your health care provider? We believe patients will pick the health care provider.
More of my thoughts on the topic are here:
http://blogs.ecommunity.com/blog/fiveyearsfromnow/0/0/the-ideal-personal-health-record
and here:
http://blogs.ecommunity.com/blog/fiveyearsfromnow/0/0/how-a-personal-health-record-should-function
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:30 am
I’m not sure that this changes anything from the hospital perspective. I don’t know anyone doing full integration with the ‘patient portals’ yet. It is all pretend – hosted apps tied to legacy systems that have no real business in showing their face to the patient anyway.
We’re working on a user model to integrate Patient Compass and Patient Online just using passthrough authorization. Were Google’s EHR a part of the soup already, I’d hope that their authentication piece would allow something similar. Given their adoption of OpenID and some other things they’re doing, I have to think it would.
IMHO this whole thing was a bit of a race to the gate for Google and Microsoft. Microsoft got there first and has an impressive toolset but Google’s more open mentality will allow them to dominate the field. Microsoft’s EHR backside looks like any of the rest of their tools: ugly with a learning curve – not what the average user is going to leap at.
If I were Epic or McKesson or Eclipsys or any of the rest of the major players, I’d be scrambling to make my tools work with Google right now. God knows the industry could use some standardization.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:37 am
Michael Fisher – I don’t think that lack of secure messaging is going to be an obstacle to Google’s dominance.
A) They’ll probably figure something out given how extensive their communication platform is.
B) Docs I’ve spoken to *hate* patient emails/messaging. In systems where it is fully rolled out, docs are spending too large a portion of their time on this non-reimbursed service. And a few I’ve spoken to think it further encourages the loathed self diagnosis.
Google were smart getting Cleveland Clinic on board to try this out – that’s a healthcare brand that docs and execs are only too happy to emulate.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Almost any PHR is “neutral.” I’ve still got mine in Aurora’s patient portal and I can use it and access it from anywhere. No advantage for Google, in my view. And in my humble opinion, I trust my health care provider — even my former health care provider — with my health info a lot more than I trust a marketing behmouth like Google.