Microsoft and Google are taking their rivalry to the doctor's
office, running
competing services that allow people to store their medical records
online for
access by family members and healthcare providers.
Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are similar approaches:
They let
patients input their own medical data either by typing it in or by
giving
permission for the vendor to get the information from a healthcare
provider or
insurer with which it's partnering. Google Health and Microsoft
HealthVault then
provide tools for those partners to give the patient personalized
health advice
and other services built around the person's records.
These "personal health records"—PHRs for
short—complement electronic medical records. Both types of
records contain a lot of the same information on the patient's
conditions, test results, prescriptions, and other medical data.
But
PHRs are compiled and controlled by the patient, while EMRs are
compiled and,
for the most part, controlled by the doctors, hospitals, and other
healthcare
organizations.
Google's Approach
Google Health aims to let consumers "get more directly involved in
their
healthcare," said Roni Zeiger, product manager for Google Health.
"Medicine
continues to become more complicated, doctors have less and less
time to spend
with patients in the exam room, and each of us as a patient has
greater
responsibility to take care of ourselves and our loved ones."
Google has been a leading player in e-health simply because
searches on
healthcare topics have always been popular. When people get
sick—or think they
getting sick—one of the first things they do is go online for
information.
"What I hear from a lot of my doctor friends is that people are
often coming
in with a pretty big pile of questions that they've gotten from
reading online
or elsewhere," said Zeiger, who's a practicing doctor. "Sometimes
those are
well-informed questions, sometimes less so. Part of our mission is
to narrow
down the 20 pages worth of questions to perhaps one page of more
informed
questions."
That's good for the patient, and it also lets doctors see patients
more
quickly without compromising quality of care. And sometimes
patients find
treatments in their research that their own doctors aren't aware
of.
Google Health, which was launched last year, provides an interface
where
users can type in data. Users can also give Google Health
permission to access
data held by various healthcare companies. For example, more than
100 million
people in the U.S. can give Google Health access to electronic
copies of their
prescription histories at a pharmacy or pharmacy benefit manager,
such as CVS
Caremark, Walgreens, and Medco Health Solutions.
Google Health lets people organize all relevant health information
in one
safe place, Zieger said.
Partnering Up
Google is teaming with other organizations that can use its PHRs to
offer
personalized information and services. For example, the American
Heart
Association—with your permission—will check your blood
tests imported from
another partner, Quest Diagnostics, to find out your cholesterol
level, blood
pressure readings, and correlate those with other health data, such
as whether
you have diabetes. It then can compile all the information to
determine your
ten-year risk for a heart attack, and what you can do to lower the
risk.
Another example: Google Health partner MDLiveCare, which offers
video
consultations with doctors, let a patient click a button on the
MDLiveCare site
to import all of his or her medical history from Google Health.
That way the
doctor has some background on the patient's medical condition.
Cleveland Clinic, a not-for-profit academic medical center, lets
patients
export their records into Google Health. Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center, a
Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, has linked its
PatientSite patient
portal to Google Health. Other partners that are letting Google
import medical
and drug prescription information, with a patient's permission,
include
Allscripts, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.
Google Health is free to consumers and partner organizations.
Google expects
that, as more people use Google Health services, they'll do more
searches, which
will increase the company's ad revenue.