Google Exploring Tool Designed to Help Patients Use Their Health Records

In recent times, Google has been working on a tool designed to help clinicians filter complicated patient information more quickly and view it in context.   Now it’s thinking about doing the same thing for consumers.

Google began to test the professional tool, which it calls Care Studio, with small groups of clinicians in Nashville, TN and Jacksonville, FL affiliated with the Ascension system. A few weeks ago it announced that it is expanding the pilot to embrace additional physicians and nurses.

But the big G’s health data filtering efforts aren’t aimed just at doctors and nurses. According to a new piece appearing in Stat News, the search giant’s early in the process of putting feedback on how patients might want to see, organize, and share their own medical record data.

Google is apparently recruiting about 300 patients for the health record study, drawing on community health facilities academic medical centers in California, Atlanta and Chicago that use Epic as their EMR vendor. Patients can only participate if they use an Android device.

As part of the program, users will test features giving them the ability to collect information from their providers’ patient portals, a spokesperson told Stat.

If this works well it could be a very desirable tool for keeping track of your consumer health activities. Heck, I’m seen by at least five physicians’ offices for minor chronic conditions and unifying that information would be a godsend. I can only imagine how useful such a filter would be to say, an adult child trying to keep track of their ailing parents’ medical information.

According to the publication, Google has not yet partnered directly with any healthcare organizations, but has reached out to a few, including the University of California, Davis, UCSF, Alameda Health System in Oakland, CA and Access Community Health Network in Chicago.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. As Stat notes, Google has been here before. More than a decade ago Google Health was messing around with PHR models which might’ve made some sense if people on the team knew what they were trying to accomplish, not that its competitors did either. (For example, Microsoft HealthVault didn’t get any further.)

However, as the article points out, we’re in a different time and place now. As the author notes, the new effort that not-so-coincidentally comes as federal information blocking rules fall into place. With patients now able to access their medical records via health apps, those who become consumers’ health data app of choice will be in a powerful position. Fighting for the loyalty of those consumers makes sense.

Even so, however, as of yet the real action still lies in the hands of clinicians. I’m paying far closer attention to deals like Google’s agreement to partner with Highmark Health on a patient engagement platform it calls Living Health. The Living Health Dynamic Platform, which will be built on Google Cloud, will give Highmark access to Google Cloud’s analytics and AI capabilities along with the Google Cloud healthcare API.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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