Yesterday, Google formally announced it plans for creating a personal health record (PHR) service at the Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society conference in Orlando. Google's announcement was three days after Microsoft announced at the same conference a $3 million initiative "designed to empower providers with targeted funding to stimulate the research and development of online tools that improve health" in support of its four-month-old HealthVault PHR offering. Both companies say their objective is "to put you in control of your health information."
Google is currently piloting its system at the Cleveland Clinic, and hopes to have a commercial offering later this year.
Both Microsoft and Google have come under pressure about how secure their PHR systems will be as well as how patient information will be used. For instance, this week the World Privacy Forum (WPF) issued a report and a consumer advisory warning of the risks that PHRs pose.
As the advisory notes, "Consumers need to know that not all PHRs protect privacy in the same way, and some PHR systems can undermine consumer privacy in serious ways that consumers may not be expecting... Few consumers understand that their health care files are not always protected under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) when their files are in a PHR."
Neither Google or Microsoft are covered by HIPAA regulations, and so have been very publicly seeking to reassure potential users that their information will be secure and private. However, as the WPF says, I would be very wary of using any PHR service that is not HIPAA compliant (and has been thoroughly and independently audited to show that it is). HIPAA doesn't provide much protection (only 4 people have been criminally convicted of HIPAA violations in the past five years that I know of), but it is better than nothing.
The other problem is how the PHR information is going to be used. Microsoft places medical company advertisements on its HealthVault site but says it won't use any of your health record information unless you give permission. Google says it doesn't plan to advertise right now or use the information either, which makes one wonder how it plans to make money on its service.
I believe that it is only a matter of time before Microsoft and Google, as well as other PHR service providers, start agitating for access to their users' personal health information, though. Right now pharmaceutical companies very profitably data mine doctors' drug prescription information to up-sell them individually, and medical researchers are clamoring to get access to all patient data that a national electronic health record system would create. There is gold in them there records.
I give it a better than a 70-30 chance that Microsoft, Google and other PHR companies quietly lobby members of Congress to allow them legal "peeks" at patient information for "research" purposes within the next five years - if they aren't doing so already.
Comments (1)
See The New York Times "Bits" for a plausible strategy for Google to turn this into a goldmine without access to the data in the PHRs.
Posted by Jim Horning | February 29, 2008 9:51 PM
Posted on February 29, 2008 21:51