Today Google launched Google health – a service designed to help people manage their medical records. Once info is uploaded, you can search for medicines, simple cures and more information about your particular ailments.
It sounds like a great idea, but my first thought was about the potential privacy issues. Do I really want my medical records stored on the Internet? Having worked for a hospital IT dept. I know the privacy threats all too well. It’s probably best to just get doctor’s advice anyway.
Many of the doctors I know recommend Pubmed for topical medical questions. But you don’t have to upload records to access it.
If you are still interested, Erick Schonfeld wrote up a A Quick Hands-On Look at the service:
Whereas HealthVault’s strengths seem to lie in tying together different health information silos on the back end, Google Health is focusing more initially on the consumer side. It is trying to do an end-run around the health establishment by trying to get consumers to manually load their own medical information into their profiles. HealthVault allows this as well, but seems to have stronger partnerships with back-end health data providers.
Personally, I will choose not to participate. But I am curious what you think of the privacy issues that could be associated with Google having access to your medical records? Is it safe? Or a bad idea?
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Who cares? They have your name, contact information, email, contact lsit calendar, interests (google reader, google searches etc)… what could health records do?
Besides, what’s the difference between trusting your doctor and google with your health records?
>>Who cares? They have your name, contact information, email, contact lsit calendar, interests (google reader, google searches etc)… what could health records do?
They could keep you from getting a job, insurance, home loan, car loan, etc. . .
>>Besides, what’s the difference between trusting your doctor and google with your health records?
The difference is that I can find my doctor and sue him if my records get out. With Google, you won’t even know when they get out. Notice I didn’t say “if”.
That’s an issue of the law. If your political state has laws like that, you should work on changing the laws or moving away, not hiding your information from your government.
As for knowing when your records get out, you wouldn’t know any better if your doctor gave out the records as opposed to Google. The only difference is Google would have better lawyers.
Well there already are Federal HIPA laws in place that provide penalties for unauthorized disclosure of that information. That does not prevent it from happening. In fact, the Federal government itself has already broken this law multiple times (see Veterans Administration), and no one has gone down for that.
Regardless, a law isn’t going to keep it from getting out. Once it’s out, it’s out. Maybe you can get $1000 b/c the HIPA law says so, but that’s a small consolation prize for the problems this could cause.
Hmm I see your dilemma. I’d say go for very stiff penalties for those who use your informations which was leaked.
Though has Google ever used people’s information contrary to how they agreed? If I recall correctly Google has a good reputation when it comes to privacy. They may intimidate people with the knowledge and intelligence they have but they haven’t every used it in shady dealings. That’s a reputation I’d say they want to keep.
Sure, Google has a good reputation but we aren’t just talking about Google. There are a lot of intermediary factors that can affect the privacy. How many of us use WiFi to connect to the Internet? Is it encrypted? If it is, is your ISP 100% trustworthy? What if you are accessing your Google account from work, just when the IT staff is capturing packets? Are people ok with their employers knowing their medical history?
Then there’s Google, who is storing the files forever – who says they’ll be trustworthy if a pharmaceutical firm buys this portion of their business?
I hate to sound paranoid. But of all the great services Google offers, I don’t like the direction this one is taking. It’s an unnecessary risk with very little up-side for the consumer that I can see.
Well as far as this PARTICULAR service is concerned, actually the benefits for the consumer are pretty vast. A friend of mine just did a thesis on systems like these.
The benefits really depend on the health care system you have already, but for the most part it’s safe to say that either of ours isn’t perfect.
Once you centralize your health data and make it accessible to diagnostic systems, the health care system is at a much greater advantage of meeting your needs as a patient than a doctor who needs to wait on records on other doctors or may make an incorrect diagnosis because of a lack of information.
So I guess if you separated your identity for your healthcare data when putting it into diagnosis systems like Google is offering, your piracy issue is mostly solved and you still get all of the benefits.
It would be cool if healhcare systems came up with an international standard for storing data like this and then gave each patient this file, which they could put into systems like the one Google has without connecting it to your identity.