{"id":616,"date":"2006-12-07T16:34:01","date_gmt":"2006-12-07T23:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=616"},"modified":"2006-12-07T16:34:01","modified_gmt":"2006-12-07T23:34:01","slug":"a_preview_of_go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=616","title":{"rendered":"A preview of Google’s “health URL”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a post<\/a> about Google’s product plans a couple of days ago, I noted a recent blog entry<\/a> by Google VP Adam Bosworth that implied Google will attempt to create a system that individuals could use to store all their health and medical information. “We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily,” he wrote. “We believe our industry should help solve this problem.” In a speech<\/a> today at a health conference<\/a>, Bosworth provided more clues about what Google has in mind.<\/p>\n

Bosworth begins by calling attention to an area where, he says, “innovation is badly needed”:<\/p>\n

\n

There is no place individuals can go to get a comprehensive set of health and medical information about themselves. Access to this comprehensive information can be vital to proper and timely diagnosis of the patient, to the patient getting the best possible treatment, and, perhaps sometimes overlooked, to the patient getting the best possible ongoing care and support after the initial treatment, especially for chronic illnesses … We should not accept this. We should not accept that the institutional barriers of the system cause tens of thousands to die unnecessarily and hundreds of thousands at the very least to suffer without cause while we pay an enormous bill.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So “what can be done?” Bosworth asks. He then sketches out the Google solution, which includes the creation of a “health URL” for every patient:<\/p>\n

\n

Let\u2019s put the patients in charge of their health and medical information. Let\u2019s build a system which puts the people who are sick in control. For every single medical and health-related event, let\u2019s make sure that patients can effortlessly retrieve and share their information in its totality and then use it to ensure that they get the best quality of care possible. It is their health. The people who treat, diagnose, test or dispense medications to patients should be required to deliver, instantly, over the net, at the speed of light, that information to those patients to use as they see fit. If these patients choose to share it with caregivers or health coaches or nursing services, that should be their right …<\/p>\n

Every ill person needs a \u201chealth URL,\u201d an online meeting place where their caregivers \u2014 with express permission from the ill person \u2014 can come together, pass on notes to each other, review each other\u2019s notes, look at the medical data, and suggest courses of action. This isn\u2019t rocket science. It is online web applications 101. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Google, he says in closing, has been exploring this type of system for the last year, and “we are confident that increased and more targeted use of technology will help improve healthcare for all.”<\/p>\n

“Google loves to bite off problems that are extremely hard to chew,” John Battelle wrote<\/a> about Bosworth’s earlier post, “but this one might prove undigestable for all sorts of reasons.” If anything, that’s an understatement. Then again, if any one company has the ability to get this ball rolling, it’s probably Google. Where it will roll to is anyone’s guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a post about Google’s product plans a couple of days ago, I noted a recent blog entry by Google VP Adam Bosworth that implied Google will attempt to create a system that individuals could use to store all their health and medical information. “We believe that patients should control and own their own health […]<\/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-616","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\/616","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=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}