Google Health
The American medical system is a mess. If you ignore the inconsistent and expensive nature for a moment, there is still the nightmare that are medical records. Unless you go to the same doctor for the entirety of your life, you're bound to have fragmented pieces of your history spread across countless practices, specialties and even states. There exists no unified system and because of this, most doctors use proprietary software to manage their patients' information. The end result in rehashing your entire medical history every time you visit a new doctor and in extreme cases, injury or death result from a conflict due to an incomplete picture. As someone who isn't afraid to visit as a specialist when it's necessary, I know I loathe the idea of having to fill out pages upon pages about my health.
Google wants to change this with Google Health. Not yet realized as the one stop record shop they hope it will be, they're encouraging people to use it for various medical directives as a start. I suspect the tool doesn't get a ton of usage and they're promoting it in hopes more people will buy into it.
The question is, do we trust Google? People tend to be very sensitive about their medical histories so is hosting that information "in the cloud" something we're ready for? Is our information secure both from internal and external threats? Will an increased dependency on a hosted solution leave us in the dark in a time of peril? As the company aggregates more and more of our lives (email, calendars, docs, voice mail), are we in danger of one day waking up with a Google hangover?
Google wants to change this with Google Health. Not yet realized as the one stop record shop they hope it will be, they're encouraging people to use it for various medical directives as a start. I suspect the tool doesn't get a ton of usage and they're promoting it in hopes more people will buy into it.
The question is, do we trust Google? People tend to be very sensitive about their medical histories so is hosting that information "in the cloud" something we're ready for? Is our information secure both from internal and external threats? Will an increased dependency on a hosted solution leave us in the dark in a time of peril? As the company aggregates more and more of our lives (email, calendars, docs, voice mail), are we in danger of one day waking up with a Google hangover?