Google Health Open Platform Is Great — Or Awful 179
JackPowers writes "The Google Health APIs enable portable, standardized, open architecture, extensible personal health records, which is nice but boring if they're just used to manage the paperwork of the doctor/patient relationship. But once the data is set free, all kinds of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 apps are possible. This article looks ahead 10 years at Best Case Scenarios. A follow-up article lists the Worst Case Scenarios."
Google is not to be trusted (Score:5, Insightful)
This is already a big problem with credit companies becoming so pervasive. It's also bad enough that private companies are leading the American military around by the nose. But that pales in comparison to the actual, direct, and personal limits imposed by something like the system the article is talking about.
The ideas are cool (Score:5, Insightful)
But that doesn't mean they're good. Diet monitoring? Try this [freshmeat.net], or any other free web service that does it *without* needing your medical history. Fitness Monitoring? Doesn't Wii Fit do this? How about a simple spreadsheet? Travel? Is it that hard to look at The Weather Channel [weather.com] before you leave?
Honestly, this just sounds like candy-coating a terrible idea so that people will buy into it. None of the ideas on that page are lacking a non-Google implementation assuming you're not too lazy to do some footwork.
Then again, if you are too lazy, maybe whatever ill effects you receive from using Google's service are deserved...
Re:Google is not to be trusted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:agreed with the worst case. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless this is mandated by somebody or other, you're free to post or not post whatever you want on Google health.
That's fine, but it does severely limit the usefulness of the product. As a physician, I'm not going to be inclined to spend much time looking at a highly edited version of somebody's medical history. There is a reason we ask for records from doctors or hospitals. It's far too easy to simply edit out the uncomfortable bits of your life. That of course, is perfectly within your rights, but my job is too look at the whole history, not bits and pieces.
I don't see this as taking off much in the professional sector - it may be popular in the direct-to-consumer advertising space (which is why I cynically suspect it exists), but it's too limited to be much use professionally. Not useless, but very limited.
The truly scary part is that the "10 worst" scenarios are much more likely to come true that the "10 best".
Re:worst case scenario? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:worst case scenario? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, sometimes bad health has nothing to do with having an unhealthy lifestyle. It seems to me that "giving an obvious economic incentive to become healthier" will also have the unintended consequence of economically punishing people who got an unlucky roll of the genetic dice.
Re:worst case scenario? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or go to work for a drug company, or a healthcare provider. They see an economic incentive in keeping people in poor health.
E-Records and good thing but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:worst case scenario? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe we can ban alcohol nationally, since that worked so well last time.
Oh, I know. Mandatory exercise. Not running fast enough? Well, attack dogs are cheaper that what you're costing medicare, so enough with your rights.
The idea the economics of health care must trump individual rights leads to complete regulation and control of everyone's lives as a "cost saving measure". It's totalitarianism.
But I suspect you know that, since your sig line seems to indicate you're trolling.. if so, well done.
think it through a little more (Score:4, Insightful)
More plausibly, how about someone in government thinks that lifestyle X is bad for you, and starts handing out tax penalties and rebates accordingly -- but he's wrong. Not like we've ever had any health fads that turned out to be nonsense, right? And no government bureaucrat would dream of making decisions when he doesn't really have enough information to make a good one, right?
Re:Google is not to be trusted (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google is not to be trusted (Score:3, Insightful)
A criminal background check, ok, not a big deal for the most part and can save a company a lot of potential headaches and/or liability.
A credit check though? What good does that do for a company? Actually, wouldn't most companies prefer employees with less than good credit ratings as they would likely be less able to leave the job?
Piss test too you say. And why can't this be left to law enforcement? Pretty serious invasion of privacy, and if there's not a damned good reason for it how can it possibly be justified?
Actually, companies doing these things could be opening themselves up for lawsuits. A lot of places have laws in place to disallow discriminatory hiring practices, which these in most cases would be. There would have to be a darned good reason for discriminating based on credit rating for the job to use that as a reason not to hire someone.
Anyways, there are probably more reasons than just this as to why you _don't_ own your own company. But should you ever make the leap, could you just post a notice on
but you're an amateur (Score:5, Insightful)
That's as logical as thinking that it would take Linus Torvalds as long to understand a kernel patch as J. Random User who's never coded a line in his life. Or that your car mechanic needs to carefully listen to every sound your jalopy makes to know whether it needs a valve job. Or that the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic would have to get out a tuning fork and go carefully around to listen to each of his 150 musicians to know whether the orchestra is playing in tune.
Re:worst case scenario? (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as you are on the enforcement end, and not on the end being forced to give up all of your rights as a rational being, everything will always look win-win.
Re:agreed with the worst case. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in Alaska, come up and visit. Bring your harpoon....
"Taking the time to read your entire medical history" may or may not be particularly relevant. If you are young and healthy without significant ongoing issues, it may be perfectly unnecessary. I likely don't care about the details of your tonsilectomy at age 6 (I might, however, if you had a significant anesthetic reaction).
But you bring up a good point that's generally obfuscated in these debates: You may not want every detail of a person's medical history at any given time. Sometimes you do. Having to wade through tons of extraneous detail makes it easy to miss important tidbits. Getting a 200 page printout from a 6 day hospitalization with everything including the janitor's notes doesn't help me much. Putting that in machine readable format helps me maybe a bit. What we don't have is an underlying, consistent framework for electronic medical records that's used by everyone and has the capability to organize a huge amount of information into a generally usable format.
There are baby steps out there, but it's a huge chicken and egg problem for the field. I personally see the digitalization of medical records happening *very* slowly - over the next 20 years or so. And that's a feature, not a bug folks. There are absolutely huge societal issues to be dealt with before we give some uber-governmental department the holy grail of databases. I'd rather have the current fragmented system then allow every government and corporate entity start data mining for whatever purpose of the week they feel important (or profitable).
If Things Get Serious...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Romeo and Juliet share STD data. They are both clean (or so the record says). Great. They can now enjoy sex with each other.
Then, over time, they decide that this relationship is really a great thing and they want to start looking into marriage. They get married. Everybody is happy.
Now that they're married (because nobody would be stupid enough to share this type of data BEFORE marriage...would they?), they share their genetic information with each other as they are talking about children. But, what's this?! Juliet sees that Romeo has a high propensity for Down Syndrome (or any other "disease" - take your pick). Well, this isn't good.
So, instead, Juliet decides to get a divorce and go on her merry way.
The End
Re:Google is not to be trusted (Score:5, Insightful)
An insightful comment if ever I read one, but I'm afraid you're a few generations late. As a society we gave up believing in government, institutions of power or authority, religeon, civic responsibility and most all notions of tradition, and adopted instead a belief in individuality and self-fullfilment. That doesn't leave us with much, does it?
If the current trend continues and free market idealogues get to rule the day, we should expect to have everything from infrastructure to institutions ruled and run entirely by corporations (to the extent they don't already), and we'll all be working for Taco Bell or for The Brawndo Corporation.
The situation can also be viewed political terms. A good portion of the electorate really does believe that government is evil, that government can't possibly do anything as efficiently or as cheaply as business, and that taxes infringe on their God given rights, but they're only too happy to let the Walmarts of the world take over provided they can maintain the illusion they've kept a few extra dollars in their own pockets.
The people who complain about undue corporate influence on government probably don't notice that they've succumbed to those same influences in their own lives, but they might notice when there's nothing left to sell off, somebody else holds all the cards and those free-market choices they've been promised come up short.
Google, I think, is doing what any business does, and that's fulfulling an unmet need and making or trying to make a profit in doing so. The question is why we're not doing it ourselves?
Re:Oh Hell (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget that it has to use the Wisdom of Clowns.
Good not that different from Bad (Score:1, Insightful)
Take the sex examples:
Best Possible Thing - Romeo and Juliet share STD information after getting to know each other, before having sex.
Worst Possible Thing - Lonesone Larry freely decides to share his STD information with prospective dates.
There isn't that much difference. And while we might think Larry's decision is stupid, he might have a good reason for it.
The same goes for some of the other issues.
Re:Google is not to be trusted (Score:3, Insightful)
Now on top of that...I think these services are monumentally stupid because of some of the very reasons you mention. That many people with all their medical data all in one place. That is a datamining heaven. Corporations will want that "Sorry, you have too much of a medical history, we don't want to hire you because you will cost us too much". Insurance companies will want that "Oh, you have a family history of 4 major expense problems...your premium will be tripled for this and will be subject to early termination." Of course there is the tremendous amount of political value "Prolifer Sally is on her 3rd abortion." Then the really really really fun one everyones favorite reoccuring government program! Eugenics! What better way to track down all of the undesirables that you would like to exterminate. To hell with getting IBM to help you with a census like the Nazi's, we have DNA testing these days!
All of this with no real protection to stop any of these companies from selling out to the highest bidder. Or has it has been lately with the Bush Administration and the telcos search engines...just rolling over for whatever nonsense the government asks for in its quest for the "War on (Drugs|Terror|Poverty|Other)".
Re:web 3.0? (Score:3, Insightful)
Web 1.0 was "It's a series of tubes."
Web 2.0 is "It's a cloud."
Web 3.0 will be "It's pixie dust and fairie magic".