Google Health
As John D. Halamka, MD points out, Google Health has hit the market. It has a noble aim of providing a single view of its users’ health information.
This raises a few of interesting points. Google has the reach to do this and as such could short circuit multi billion dollar initiatives such as the UK’s Connecting for Health. Better still it is a global offering. It feels a bit like Wifi obviating 3G. Whilst Google is perhaps relatively primitive, its pay per click model will probably enable it to self-fund its evolution.
The scary point is that Google is a commercial outfit and thus has no board of governors focused on the well being of the patients.
However, once they work out the correlation between web viewing and general health they may well be in a genuinely valuable position of detecting illness.