Google's official blog is a must read. Period. I say that Google is on its way to becoming the most important software company on the planet. Even if they turn out not to win every fight, they're setting the terms of the fight. Making every game a home game tilts the odds in your favor. So if you want to see what's coming, here's where you look.
Another of the very many blog entries I'm behind on is this one from May 23, on taking control, specifically, of your health records. Do you know what's in yours? I go to a doctor pretty regularly, I see him writing stuff down...but I have no idea what it actually says. I have no idea who else has seen what's there.
More important to my long-term care, I have no real way to connect my needs to the best people to address them. I have no way to evaluate the assumptions my doctor has made for my treatment. And, as a big fan of community-based problem solving, I don't have easy access to the best communities for addressing my conditions or concerns.
Google's idea is to, first, give me access to my own records in standardized, meaningful fashion. How else can we evaluate the care we receive and its alternatives?
Now, Google gets slammed for peering into everybody's business, but that's beside the point. They're the first ones to lay this out as part of their goals. Here's a fantastic place to start checking that out, actually a link to an editorial their Global Privacy Counsel wrote in the Financial Times. There are a bunch of other interesting links on that page, including one that looks at the role of personalized search in the enterprise. Most of them are, of course, links to blogs, by far the best source of news on the internet.
I think the arguments for personalizing online information around medicine in particulare are extremely compelling.
Here are "the three core principles of a future health care system:
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."
(Not exactly related to this, but sorta, is that I think Google's computers are more reliable than my own for securing those records. Ever lost a hard drive and all the info on it? I thought so. Ever lost anything in your Google apps -- gmail, calendar, etc.? Didn't think so.)
Anyway, if you care about your health (sorry, the marketeer in me says stuff like this), you should check this out. These are the notes from Google VP Adam Bosworth's address to a medical information society. I found 'em downright inspirational:
It is Google’s vision that these two core capabilities, reliable unambiguous computable medical data and safe systems for trust and authentication and controlled access will dovetail with the consumer needs for discovery about everything in their health arena. As this rolls out and consumers truly can discover what is the state of the art and what they should know about their treatments, where they are being treated, how they are being treated, and how they will mange their diseases or recovery, this consumer awareness will lead to far greater consumer control, far better health data, and inevitably, to a very different health world than the current one.
A very different health world than the current one? I'm in.
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