Healthcare IT Information

Google Health is up and running

Today, Google has made its Google Health program publicly available. You can get a tour of Google Health here and FAQs are available here.

TechCrunch has a great comparison (“…Hands-on Look“) of Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault.

“Whereas HealthVault’s strengths seem to lie in tying together different health information silos on the back end, Google Health is focusing more initially on the consumer side. It is trying to do an end-run around the health establishment by trying to get consumers to manually load their own medical information into their profiles. HealthVault allows this as well, but seems to have stronger partnerships with back-end health data providers.”

Google promises never to advertise on Google Health. So how will they make money? Likely, there will be a Google search bar in the Google Health portal and Google can collect ad revenue from related Google.com searches.

TechCrunch wisely points out that:

“…the key is importing your medical record in there. That is going to be a huge hurdle in terms of people feeling comfortable giving that sort of data to Google in the first place, and then simply getting the data in an electronic form from their doctors.”

El periódico el País relata su opinión en el artículo “El Dr. Google te recuerda que tomes la pastilla” (en español).