Google and Microsoft: Your next health care partner?
Google and Microsoft may eventually become the envy of medical researchers, as the technology behemoths take on the role of hosting health care databases for consumers' own personally controlled health records (PCHRs).
The movement toward consumers controlling their own health records and the means that will get them there raises several issues of concern, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Under a PCHR, a patient would set up a portal that could authorize their doctors, health care providers, researchers, and family members to provide and share information relating to the patient. Those records and information would be stored in the patient's PCHR, which would be hosted by Google Health or the Microsoft HealthVault.
Microsoft is working with New York Presbyterian Hospital, and Google is working with Cleveland Clinic to have those institutions provide their patients with an electronic copy of their own records.
Once patients give their approval, companies, government organizations, health-related operators, and others could create applications that would connect to the PCHR platforms.
But the authors of the report, Dr. Kenneth Mandl and Dr. Isaac Kohane, raise a number of key questions concerning the PCHR service providers, such as whether the service providers will have a research mission and whether they would allow secondary use of any aggregated data of their users. And, of course, the issue of privacy was also addressed (PDF). The PCHR service providers are not under the same regulations as the health care industry, which restricts the sharing of patient information to only those people or entities whom the patient designates under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
The report says that Google and Microsoft's databases of patient information may eventually grow to be larger and more up-to-date than the databases of other well-known medical research programs. As a result, researchers may find it easier and cheaper to team up with Microsoft and Google when doing their research, rather than relying on a number of sources for data to do their research.
Challenges in putting PCHRs to use include limitations by some laboratories in releasing medical results to patients, the fact that a substantial number of medical records are still paper-based, and that the U.S. currently has no universal patient identification system.
"Despite these challenges, many consumers with PCHRs will soon control a valuable resource--an integrated copy of their health care information across sites of care," the researchers note.
Dawn Kawamoto covers enterprise security and financial news relating to technology for CNET News. E-mail Dawn. 
What really needs to happen is a webservice and database that runs on my home PC, that I directly control. That way I can pull the plug if I want to.
I would be really careful with all of this "cloud" ocmputing. It sounds sexy but your life won't be yours soon.
tim
In my view, Microsoft and Google would be best served to adhere to the standards/regulations even though they are not legally bound to them. And maybe even come out in favor of (or lobby for) making their type of business bound to the same regulations. That would give them credibility and fend off smaller potential competitors hoping to make money through more questionable uses of our data.
They would also be best served to figure out interoperability or standards for information sharing between their two systems (we don't need another VHS/Beta) if they haven't already. (Am guessing there's a proposed XML schema out there already?)
Lastly, jointly fund an independent council/omsbudsman-type-group to provide oversight and to work with people like Drs. Mandl and Kohane to make sure that they're starting off -- and staying -- in the good graces of the patient and the medical community they hope to make money selling their solution to.
I think there are many cases where Microsoft can make a lot more money by simply removing all traces of the word "Microsoft" from its public appearance. This might be a case where the same could be said for Google. A new company owned by these two giants with neither company's name would totally clean-up in this space.