Tony Eviston wrote: > > It looks as though Google are taking the concept seriously including > some google-side decision support systems > > > http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/is-there-doctor-in-family.html > > http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-do-you-know-youre-getting-best-care.html
I'll happily bet that within 2 years Google will unilaterally come up with a Web-based EHR and associated decision-support tools which is better than anything else anyone else is doing, and they'll offer it for free, perhaps with some restrained advertising to support it. They'll fund all this out of their own deep pockets. And it will have a nice, simple API which will allow interfaces to be written to allow existing desktop clinical information systems to upload data to it (and maybe download). And they will do all this by looking at all the existing standards and harmonisation initiatives, picking the eyes out of them, and then doing their own thing, in-house, thereby bypassing the committee quagmire of HL7 and the like. I would not be surprised if they pick up on the openEHR work, but they will actually implement (probably a modified and extended version of) the openEHR ideas in 6 months flat. All this will probably be aimed at the US health care market initially, but it won't take them long to offer it elsewhere (in the same way that Google Maps first only covered the US, but now covers many other places, including Oz, in stunning detail). There is a Google R&D office, quite a large one, here in Sydney, overlooking Darling Harbour... Would all this be good or bad? On the one hand, a rich, smart and iconoclastic organisation like Google acting as a cat amongst the cooing, established, health IT pigeons would be a good thing. On the other hand, Google, although they profess to try not to be evil, is a publicly-traded corporation, and they own all their stuff and all our search histories and emails (if you use Gmail) and other data. I'm not very comfortable with that, and would be even less comfortable with them holding detailed health data, all subject to US search warrants etc. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
