Wednesday, 05.21.08

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Photo by Flickr user j.reed under a Creative Commons license

Google is unveiling a new personal health records service, Google Health

Ten years ago, a similar product might have saved me some serious heartache. I was ambulanced to an emergency room with chest pains, and the cardiologist on call diagnosed me as having a heart attack. Not quite. If she had been able to access my medical history, she might have seen that my father had had an aortic aneurysm and checked for that. Instead, she put me on blood thinner, causing my aneurysm to bleed all the more and almost bringing my brilliant career, among other things, to an untimely end. Thanks to a surgeon-god named Paul Corso and a St. Jude's valve, I survived.

Privacy defenders worry that Google's service, which allows password-protected users to compile and share their health information, may make medical records vulnerable to prying by the government, employers, or other unauthorized snoops. (Since Google is not a health care provider, it isn't covered by the privacy provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.)

But this concern is misguided on at least two counts. First, while breaches of health information are already incredibly widespread, most involve petty thefts of laptops, disks, or hard drives, not hacks of health websites. (In the two years leading up to one September 2006 GAO study, 40 percent of federal health-insurance contractors and state Medicaid agencies had a privacy breach involving personal medical information.) Google is arguably better equipped to prevent such lapses, and more fundamentally interested in doing so, since breaches would undermine public confidence in the company and might expose it to greater regulation. Second--and this may also be cold comfort--HIPAA isn't very effective in the first place.

With some form of universal coverage on the horizon, public attitudes toward the privacy of medical information are due for a shift. Like it or not, privacy is a second-tier concern compared with the benefits that could come from the widespread use of personal medical records. A 1999 Institute of Medicine study estimated that medical errors cause as many as 98,000 deaths a year, and tens of billions of dollars in additional health care costs; a report it issued in 2006 said that "a hospital patient can expect on average to be subjected to more than one medication error each day." More complete and accessible personal health records aren't a panacea for those ills, but they would certainly help. After all, the only thing worse than having a "pre-existing condition" that an insurance company won't cover is the condition of no longer existing.

— James Gibney

Filed Under: Google, health, health care, privacy, technology

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