Google’s Eric Schmidt Talks Health IT

I always find it interesting when someone who knows very little about healthcare IT starts joining into the discussion. Part of me wants to scream that they are making assertions about something they know little about. How often in my life have I done the same and it came back to bite me? Too often. However, the other part of me loves the idea of fresh eyes taking a look at a problem. Sometimes it stimulates a new way of thinking that promote effective change.

So, of course, I find Google CEO, Eric Schmidt’s, comments on healthcare IT interesting. Here they are according to the Science Insider:

“My question has to do with the model of health care that we’ll be facing in 5 or 10 years,” Schmidt began. “It’s pretty clear that we’ll have personalized health records, and we’ll have the equivalent of a UPC sticker with your medical history. So when you show up at the doctor with some set of symptoms, in my ideal world what would happen is that the doctor would type in the symptoms he or she also observes, and it would be matched against the data in this repository. Then this knowledge engine would use best practices, and all the knowledge in the world to give physicians some sort of standardized guidance. This is a generalized form of the checklists that you’re talking about.”

Then Schmidt made clear what was troubling him. “As computer scientists, this is a platform database problem, and we do these very, very well, as a general rule. And it befuddles me why medicine hasn’t organized itself around these platform opportunities.”

I bet Eric Schmidt wants that UPC sticker to be doing lookup on Google Health.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • Hi John,

    No wonder he would want the lookup to happen on Google Health. Even otherwise, do we not use Google every single work-day of our life for something or the other?

    I see nothing wrong in Eric’s comments.

  • Sure, nothing wrong at all. I welcome more points of view and outside perspective on Healthcare IT. I feel like he might be simplifying things some, but maybe that’s what we need to consider more.

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