{"id":1076,"date":"2008-02-29T00:04:42","date_gmt":"2008-02-29T07:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1076"},"modified":"2008-02-29T00:04:42","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T07:04:42","slug":"monetizing_illn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1076","title":{"rendered":"Monetizing illness"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, Google formally unveiled its personal health records service, Google Health, with a speech<\/a> by CEO Eric Schmidt and a blog post<\/a> by product VP Marissa Mayer. The service will initially be tested with a group of volunteers who are patients at the Cleveland Clinic before being rolled out to the general public later this year. Future partners will include a slew of hospitals and care providers, medical testing companies, pharmacy chains, and health insurers. Microsoft rolled out a similar service, called HealthVault, last October.<\/p>\n

There’s much to be said for such services. Today, a person’s health records are often scattered in many locations and in many forms, both paper and digital. They can be hard to find and even harder to combine into a unified whole. At best, that’s a nuisance. At worst, it puts people’s lives at risk. So far, the medical establishment has made little progress in rationalizing patient records. A company like Google, which knows how to apply enormous computer power to the organization of information, has the resources and the expertise to help solve this problem.<\/p>\n

There are reasons for concern, however. The issue of security – in particular, questions about how sensitive medical information will be safeguarded once it enters a database that lies outside the realm of doctor-patient privilege – has already spurred much discussion. Less discussed so far, but perhaps even more troubling, is the issue of the possible commercial exploitation of personal medical information. Providing drug makers, law firms, and other companies with the ability to target ads to people based on their health histories and current illnesses would be a goldmine for the operator of a popular health records site. As one Wall Street analyst, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, told<\/a> USA Today, “Advertisers would pay absurd amounts of money to be seen when someone wants to, say, refill a subscription online. This is more lucrative than commerce-related search.”<\/p>\n

Microsoft currently displays ads targeted to searches carried out through the HealthVault site, but it doesn’t tie ads to the health records themselves. Similarly, Google has stated that, at the moment, it has no plans to use personal health information to target ads. But neither company has ruled out the practice explicitly and entirely. Both have left themselves plenty of wiggle room for the future. As USA Today noted in its report, “Google said it wouldn’t start out selling ads but wouldn’t rule it out.” Munster, noting the huge amount of money that’s at stake, “firmly believes ads will happen.”<\/p>\n

I hope Google, Microsoft, and the other for-profit companies aiming to get into the health records business will prove Munster wrong. Exploiting information about people’s illnesses to feed them ads is ethically distasteful, and it could distort the course of medical treatments as well. It’s true that we’ve already slid a good ways down this slippery slope, having allowed drug companies to advertise pharmaceuticals like soap, but tying ads to individual health records would vastly expand the potential for manipulation and abuse.<\/p>\n

Now, while these services are in their infancy, is the right time for a public debate about the guidelines under which for-profit companies should operate health-care databases. I would hope that companies like Google and Microsoft would step forward and provide ironclad guarantees, without any wishy-washy “opt-in” and “opt-out” qualifications, that they will not allow any of the health information they store to be used to target ads or underpin other kinds of commercial promotions – ever. But if they’re not willing to do that, policymakers should consider imposing such guarantees on them. Information technology can do much good here, but it can do harm as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, Google formally unveiled its personal health records service, Google Health, with a speech by CEO Eric Schmidt and a blog post by product VP Marissa Mayer. The service will initially be tested with a group of volunteers who are patients at the Cleveland Clinic before being rolled out to the general public later […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}