Google Health: Health Empowerment or Health Intrusion?

The foremost concern expressed by critics is the potential for loss of privacy. In an age in which privacy concerns in conventional medical settings have actually been stretched to the point of absurdity (aka HIPAA, or the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), services like Google Health introduce a degree of health information accessibility and transfer that threatens to degrade privacy. Imagine, for instance, your list of drugs from the pharmacy giant you use includes a list of medications that point precisely to your diagnoses HIV drugs, cancer drugs, heart disease drugs, chronic infections, etc. Of course, information you download from, say, Medco or Walgreen’s, is already online (as we speak), and making it accessible on Google Health is simply a matter of porting it from one online database to another.

So the essential question is how secure is Google Health and how effectively will a username/password barrier maintain security?

Most of us would like our personal health records to remain restricted. Most of us would prefer that employers, insurance companies, or anyone with a stake in knowing about our health would not be allowed access to our records without express permission. While Google Health does not allow unrestrained access, and in fact pains have been taken to prevent unauthorized access, it remains a theoretical risk. Will occasions arise, for instance, when you provide your username and password to the urgent care center to access your medical records, in which the barriers break down due to human frailty or error? They surely will, but is that occasional cost and small risk too great to stop this tidal wave of information accessibility?

What if we take the flip argument: Will single-site potential for accumulated health information empower us? Will it allow healthcare providers and medical consumers an opportunity to review in detail what has transpired in our care? Will this make us smarter healthcare consumers, more effective judges of healthcare .  .  . healthier? This is where my hopes lie: the emerging phenomenon of the individual as captain of his or her own healthcare. Nobody cares more about your own health than you; not your doctor, not your pharmacy provider, not your insurance company (who, we might argue, cares least). I envision an age (many years from now) in which the level of healthcare sophistication of the average healthcare consumer of the future matches or exceeds the knowledge of the average healthcare provider of today. Services like Google Health that cultivate this phenomenon of knowledge dissemination is, I believe, a step towards this new age in health. (I would go as far as predicting that the most promising solution to the runaway costs in healthcare is not in tort reform, or in guaranteed healthcare for all, or in Medicare or insurer cost-cutting, but in the potential for the average person to seize control of preventive practices, and to become a discerning buyer-beware consumer of healthcare services sensitive to cost differences.)