Google and health again

Yesterday, I blogged about Google’s financing of 23andMe, a company focussed on personal genetics. Keeping the Google and healthcare theme going, there is a post at the Google blog today by Adam Bosworth, where he talks about a speech that he gave at the AMIA spring congress. As is his wont, Adam includes his speech notes in the blog post (pdf). The focus of the talk is a vision of the future of healthcare, specifically personalized healthcare. In keeping with talks he has given in the past, Adam starts with the premise that consumers should own their own health and wellness data, and importantly how it is used. For example, if electronic records are moving between insurers and healthcare providers, a copy should reach the consumer as well. The three pillars of Google’s healthcare vision are listed below

• Discovery – Consumers should be able to discover the most relevant health information possible
• Action - Consumers should have direct access to personalized services to help them get the best and most convenient possible health support
• Community – Consumers should be able to learn from and educate those in similar health circumstances and from their health practitioners

From my side, as a consumer, and as someone with an interest in healthcare informatics, two of those three pillars are especially important. Discovery is critical. This is an area where I feel Google has a major role to play. Google, to a large degree, made the serendipitous discovery that was the cornerstone of the early days of search, possible. Today it is leading the score of players trying to make search more relevant, more targeted, and as Frank Gruber would say, more personalized. Extending this to information about one’s healthcare information is not that much of a leap. Community is another pillar that is critical. PeerWisdom is a company that is trying to solve exactly that problem.  I also feel that some of the problems that Google is trying to address are an area where the concepts underlying Freebase could have a big role.

Action is an area where I am still conflicted. While the consumer should definitely have options, providing and recommending options should come from the provider, in consultation with the well informed consumer. While I understand what Adam is saying when he says “the consumer should be able to decide who has access to such information and with whom they share which portion”, I think that is too encompassing. What if the consumer decides not to share some information with the provider, information that might result in better care, perhaps even saving a life. It just makes me uncomfortable to keep critical information away from those who know how to interpret it best. Now, the consumer should absolutely control who else gets to see the information and should always know whom the information has gone too.

It seems to me, based on the speech and other material, that Google is hoping to play a big role in data access and information sharing (or rather control of information sharing), combined with their obvious strengths in search. Given the fear that Google is getting too big and powerful, I am sure there will be significant resistance against any such moves, so Google will have to go out of its way to convince people that a persons record is exactly that and not being mined on a Google server somewhere. That said, this is a task that requires big thinkers and people who can execute, and I have a feeling that our friends in Mountain View are up to the challenge.

Read the speech. It’s a good read.

Further reading:
Microsoft, Google, and healthcare
More on healthcare search

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