Google, Inc’s latest offering for consumers is a medical records storage service, allowing users to store and sort information about test results, appointments and medications online.
“Google Health” lets users create a health profile and enter all kinds of information: height and weight, test results, allergies, conditions, past surgeries, medications and immunizations.
The service isn’t the first of its kind, however. The Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which now includes the Camino Medical group in Mountain View, has been offering online records to patients for about seven years, according to Dr. Paul Tang, chief medical information officer and director of “PAMF Online.”
PAMF Online helps users keep track of appointments, test results and prescriptions. It makes all such information available online and sends e-mails to alert patients when a result or prescription is ready or an appointment is coming up.
About 110,000 people — half of PAMF’s primary care patients — use the service, Dr. Tang said. “It’s more or less the way we do business,” he said.
Tang’s expertise in this field may be why he is a member of the Google Health Advisory Council (which also includes famous health guru Dr. Dean Ornish) and helped shape the Internet giant’s new service.
So far about 20 pharmacies, hospitals and health care Web sites have partnered with Google Health, and customers of those sites can give permission for their information to be transferred to Google. Google hopes more health care groups and pharmacies will partner with the company and share their patients’ information — with the patient’s permission, of course.
The idea requires a measure of trust from the user, Tang said, in part because Google Health isn’t obliged to abide by the federal health privacy law known as HIPAA. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act only applies to “covered entities” like hospitals; “payers,” such as insurance companies; or “clearinghouses,” which help share information between small doctor’s offices and health insurance companies, Tang said. A service like PAMF Online is covered by HIPAA.
But Tang believes that Google can be trusted. “A company like Google is very sensitive to privacy,” he said. “They’re also a very trusted company, so you’d expect that they’d take great care and that they’d be very protective of that data.”
Google uses security software, hardware and “strict policies” to keep information on Google Health safe, according to a spokesperson.
The information is protected by state-of-the-art technologies, including Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption and firewalls, she said. Hardware backup systems and physical security, including pass codes, locks, and security personnel, are also used.
“Only the people who are operating and improving Google Health have access to user information, and they are bound by strict policies to not disclose this information to others, either within Google or to the outside world,” the spokesperson said.
It may be that, as the company enters this new realm, issues of file sharing between different health care databases will be dealt with. PAMF Online is not without its problems on this front: Complications can arise when patients are seeing one PAMF doctor and another doctor at, say, Stanford Medical Center. That’s because, even though PAMF, Stanford and even Kaiser Permanente use the same medical records software, they can’t share that information across their networks, Tang said.
Federal Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt has made improving this “interoperability standard” a primary goal. He believes more information would mean better care for patients and prevent mix-ups like bad prescription interactions, according to the Health and Human Services Web site.
