Why Google will never store your personal health information

December 2, 2006 —

Google Vice President, Adam Bosworth recently posted some thoughts on personal health information, medical records and portability.

His early statements demonstrate that Google understands that masses of individuals turn to the Internet to improve their health iq, and there’s a lot that can be done to help ensure reliable information.

I was more than a little surprised, though, to see Mr. Bosworth continue into the topic of portable medical records…

Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. —clip— We believe our industry should help solve this problem.

This sounds great, but it’s a little naive. The issue here is that the government (not to mention the hospitals, clinics, and healthcare providers) would never allow a company like Google to store personal health and medical information. They simply have too many conflicts of interest.

For fun, let’s suppose that Google did store your health info. Let’s also say you have high blood pressure. Finally, let’s say that a company like Pfizer has an AdWords account. In a scenario like this, there’s a very significant conflict and possibly even HIPAA violations as visible hints of your medical condition (in the form of Lipitor ads) are now following you around the Internet.

A lot of organizations have been lobbying (the Washington DC kind of lobbying) for a lot of years just for an opportunity to test the viability of portable medical records. You can be sure that none of them are advertising companies.

Google needs to stick to what they do second best, search. The amount of good they can do by figuring out health information credibility is enormous. And while it might seem logical to have information delivery based on the condition of each individual’s mind and body, there are just too many privacy issues.

These are only my opinions, of course. For a little background, though, clients of our personal health tools include New York City Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene and BlueCross BlueShield of Nebraska. The Wellness Councils of America is also one of our largest clients. We’ve run into some very smart, and very demanding, clients over the past ten years.

Maybe a follow-up post of where Google can create profound health benefits is in order (again, opinions only.) I posted earlier about a new service called Daily Strength. The topic of linking people with similar life experiences came up in the post as well. Daily Strength handles this idea head on, but that’s not to say there isn’t room for Google.