December 8th, 2006
Google's unhealthy medical plan
Google audacity never ceases to amaze. What is the great Googleplex conjuring up now?
Google is on a medical mission, but it is an unhealthy one.
Google wants to create nothing less than individual, dedicated, online databases, to record and store every piece of private and personal data pertaining to “every single medical and health-related event” for “effortless” retrieval and sharing.
Google insists, via Adam Bosworth, Vice President:
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.
Where would such confidential, sensitive information be housed? The mighty Google cloud undoubtedly to the medical rescue:
Every ill person needs a “health URL,” an online meeting place where their caregivers, with express permission from the ill person, can come together, pass on notes to each other, review each others’ notes, look at the medical data, and suggest courses of action…online Web applications 101.
Google, has “explored this issue” over the past year with “leading health providers and institutions.”
The conclusion? Healthcare professionals will be deemed to be “out of date” if they do not embrace Google’s vision for changing people’s lives “dramatically for the better.”
What is the grave medical situation Google desperately wants to solve?:
We live in a world in which information flows at the speed of light and in which Google can find all the most relevant answers to any query you submit across the entire Web in less than one-third of a second and yet, in general, your physician cannot get the lab results from your last specialist without paper and fax. If the information were trivial and irrelevant, this would be at least understandable. It would still be odd in a world in which I can look up effortlessly the local movie schedules or what people think about some cartoon, but it would just be an oddity.
But this information really matters; To use the cliché, it can be a matter of life and death. And the right word to describe our inability to put our hands on it is not oddity, but travesty….Some people are almost certainly dying unnecessarily…
We should not accept this. We should not accept that the institutional barriers of the system cause tens of thousands to die unnecessarily.
Bosworth detailed his own mother’s death from cancer to make a case for “empowered consumers, personal health records and emerging technologies” at a conference earlier in the week sponsored by the Markle Foundation, dedicated to promoting “A Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information.”
Bosworth acknowledged resistance to Google’s vision, but he underscored that as a “technology optimist,” he is confident that “increased and more targeted use of technology will improve healthcare for all.”
ALSO: Gmail and Health URLs: Why Google cares less about your privacy, and why you should care
