Google Offers Consumers Online Health Record Access

Google Inc., familiar to millions of people around the globe as an Internet search vehicle, recently launched a Web-based health information service called Google Health that allows consumers to create online health accounts they can use to collect and store their personal health information.

Users also can share their health information electronically with any health care provider or service that has signed on as a Google Health partner. Those partners currently include the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; laboratory testing giant Quest Diagnostics; and a cadre of retail pharmacies, health benefits companies and others.

"Right now Google Health is primarily constructed and designed for users. That is 100 percent our audience. It's a consumer-based tool," said Missy Krasner, Google Health product marketing manager. "Your mom, your sister, anybody in the United States, can go to the Google URL (uniform resource locator) and sign up with a user name and password. It's free," said Krasner.

Family physicians need not worry that Google Health will trigger an immediate avalanche of requests from patients asking them to transfer health records into patients' personal Google Health accounts.

Krasner stressed that only doctors "affiliated with … (partner) providers would have connectivity to Google Health and be able to actually push data into a user's Google Health profile." However, Google has more partners in the pipeline, and the network is bound to expand, she said.

During a two-month Google Health trial at the Cleveland Clinic earlier this year, about 1,600 patients learned how to access their personal health records stored in the hospital's MyChart software. They set up their Google Health accounts online and then, with a keystroke, created a link between their Cleveland Clinic health records and Google Health.

When the two are linked, "the information starts flowing continuously," until the patient revokes his or her agreement, said Krasner.

Now that Google Health has gone public, the information network is further extended. For instance, if a patient fills a prescription at a Walgreens pharmacy or has a lab test done at Quest Diagnostics, he or she can elect to import that history into his or her personal health record. There's even software available through Google Health partner SafeMed that checks for potential drug interactions each time new data is entered into a patient's account.

"This is the promise of interoperability," said Krasner, and that's important because a patient's medical data exists in a lot of places outside the doctor's office. With Google Health, physicians can capture patient data they didn't have access to before, and for patients on the move -- wintering in another state, for example -- their personal health data travels with them, Krasner added.

Steve Waldren, M.D., director of the AAFP's Center for Health IT, looks for the launch of the Google initiative to create positive waves throughout the country's health care system.

Google Health "empowers consumers to be active participants in their care and potentially provides a single conduit for medical information from multiple sources," said Waldren. Both concepts support the patient-centered medical home, (3-page PDF; About PDFs) a health care model that the Academy champions, he added.

In addition, the AAFP is playing an important behind-the-scenes role in lending technical expertise to Google regarding the continuity of care record, or CCR, standard. Use of the CCR ensures that certain pieces of basic information, such as the date and purpose of the patient's visit and details on the patient-clinician encounter, show up in each patient's medical record. "Google has been working with the AAFP and looks to us as leaders in figuring out how to get data in and out of physician practices," said Waldren.

In fact, Academy EVP Douglas Henley, M.D., is just wrapping up a one-year stint on the Google Health Advisory Council, a group of health care experts formed last June to offer feedback and advice on the company's health initiative.

The media coverage heaped on Google's current move into the personal health records arena also creates market value for health information technology apart from what the government is pushing and instead focuses attention on "what market solutions are going to add value to consumers," Waldren noted.

Krasner stressed that Google Health is a project in its infancy. "There are a lot of different areas where people want to organize their entire medical history online, and we're just at the beginning," she said.

Even now, just days after the public launch, Krasner said Google is hard at work on the next generation of the product.

For example, in the near future, Google Health users will be able to extend read-only online access to physicians who are not affiliated with a Google Health partner but who want to review their patients' profiles. With nothing more than an Internet connection, physicians soon will be able to take a peek -- with patients' permission -- at the most current patient data, all in one cyber-space spot.

Waldren suggested that FPs who are associated with Google Health partners and who are technically equipped with an electronic health record, or EHR, do their best to comply with patients' requests to populate their Google Health accounts. This is in concert with patient-centered health care, said Waldren, adding that there may come a time when some patients will seek out physicians who are ready, able and willing to participate in online medical record sharing.

Many FPs likely will watch the Google Health expansion with guarded interest. Count FP Sue Andrews, an early EHR adopter from Murfreesboro, Tenn., among them. Although Andrews doesn't yet have connectivity to any Google Health partners, she said her patients already can access their medical records electronically in her practice through her robust EHR.

She's even offered to create electronic medical files for patients that would contain select information from their medical records, but to her surprise, not a single patient has shown any interest. "We haven't had anybody ask for that yet," she said.

With that experience in mind -- coupled with a lukewarm patient response to another high-tech experiment called virtual health care visits -- Andrews is skeptical that consumers will jump aboard the new Google Health train en masse.

"I think there will be fewer people interested in (Google Health) than you might expect. We thought a lot of people would be interested in online health calls (virtual visits) and people really are not. They'd rather come in to see you," said Andrews.