CHICAGO (Reuters) – Web search company Google Inc is collaborating withCleveland Clinic, one of the premier U.S. health institutions, to pilot anexchange of data that puts patients in charge of their own medicalrecords.
The health care industry has been trying to usher in a paperless era for morethan a decade, holding out the promise that electronic medical records wouldbring significant cost savings.
Today only a tiny minority of hospitals and primary care physicians useelectronic medical records.
Google said it chose the Cleveland Clinic because it is one of the relativelyfew health institutions with an electronic system in place. Its eClevelandClinic MyChart stores medical records of 100,000 patients.
The Cleveland Clinic now plans to enroll 1,500 to 10,000 patients in a testof the secure exchange of medical data, including prescriptions, conditions andallergies, between its systems and a secure Google profile in a live clinicaldelivery setting.
The clinic said the goal of the model was to allow patients to interact withmultiple physicians, health care service providers and pharmacies.
The pilot will eventually extend Cleveland Clinic’s online patient servicesto a broader audience and allow patients to take their medical data with themwherever they go.
"Patients are more proactively managing their own health care information,"said Dr. C. Martin Harris, the clinic’s chief information officer.
"This collaboration is intended to help Google test features and servicesthat will ultimately allow all Americans to direct the exchange of their medicalinformation between their various providers without compromising their privacy,"Harris said.
But concerns about privacy and how access to information would be enforcedare just a couple of issues that have slowed the transition to paperless medicalrecords, said Morningstar analyst Debbie Wang.
"I think it will happen, eventually," Wang said. "This is more likely to be afalse start and a fishing expedition on Google’s part.
"From the outside, it often looks like health care is an easy target becauseit’s populated with dinosaurs who use a lot of paper," she said. "But there areconundrums."
For example, physicians often have no financial incentive for converting toelectronic systems, she said, while the benefit would mostly be to insurancecompanies unlikely to pass down the savings to consumers.
"It’s not clear to me that Google has figured out what they just bit off,"Wang said.
No one at Google was immediately available for comment.
David Webster, president of Webster Consulting, said the reason thetransition to paperless records didn’t get off the ground previously is becausethey couldn’t get enough providers to make the data available toconsumers.
"It’s the chicken and the egg," Webster said, adding that he didn’t see whyit would be different this time.
"Google is pitching this as consumer-centric. They ultimately see the daywhen the U.S. might consider a universal, national health-care system and inthat case, if they can building enough scale … then they can be the de factoIT integrator of all the information," Webster said.
"Everyone wants to be in this business. It’s a very tough thing to getaccomplished," he added.
(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Richard Chang)
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