Guadalajara Reporter - Google what?

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Google what?

Written by Pete Johanson
Saturday, 19 July 2008
I’m up in the States for a few weeks and, as usual, I took my annual physical. When leaving the office, I asked for my lab results. My plan was to give a copy of these results to my GP in Mexico. The “doc” looked at me and said, “Pete, I have a better idea, let’s use Google Health.” I had never heard of the term. How many doctors do you have? Now, with specialization, it’s not uncommon to have more than one. I have a friend approaching 80 who has some health problems and as a result has five doctors (one GP and four specialists). Each is doing lab tests and some are prescribing drugs. It is very important that each doctor knows what the other is doing. It has become a very time consuming project for both the patient and the primary care physician to ensure that each doctor has a record of what the other doctors have discovered and what medicines they are prescribing. It becomes even more complicated when my friend comes to Mexico where he does not have a regular doctor. What happens if he has a medical emergency in Mexico? Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way for his Mexican emergency physician to have immediate access to the patient’s medical records without having to contact his primary care physician, especially if that patient were seeking help in the middle of the night? That patient’s chances of a rapid recovery could be greatly increased if the emergency room doctor had immediate access to these records. Two years ago, the folks at Google had an idea. Maybe they could design a personal health information centralized data base where one’s health records could be kept, a system where each of your doctors could record lab work, X-rays etc. This site would be password protected and then with the patient’s permission any doctor, anywhere in the world, if he had an internet connection, could go on line and could get that patient’s latest lab work, shot records, X-rays, prescriptions, etc. Google coined this new program, Google Health, and first offered it to the public in Beta test stage just two months ago. The doctors I have talked to in Seattle are very excited about this “personal health information centralization service.” They are attempting to get all of their patients to sign up either on the Google program describe above or with a similar service offered by Microsoft called “HealthVault” which is also in Beta stage. Either program should be very helpful for those of us who have more than one doctor or who often live thousands of miles from our primary care physician. To learn more about Google health visit www.google.com/health. To learn more about Microsoft’s product go a Google search for “HealthVault.”