Elanso

We’ve been hearing things about Google’s latest project, Google Health, for quite some time now. It was not till Monday of this week, however, that the service was launched for the use of the general public. So what is Google Health all about?

Here is what the Google Bloggers have to say:

It’s been a busy week for the Google Health team. Last week we announced our partnership and pilot with the Cleveland Clinic. This week, the team has been at the HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) conference in Orlando, Florida, where Eric Schmidt gave the closing keynote. Eric’s keynote marks the first time we’ve talked publicly about the product we’ve been designing and building. His talk also offered a deeper view into our overall health strategy.

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.

I believe that this is something that will make it big in the very near future. After all, we all want this kind of information to be available at the click of a button. And if reports are to be believe, clients are already snatching up the opportunity to do so.

The NY Times reports:

In a two-month trial this year, the Cleveland Clinic found that its patients were eager to use the Google health records.
The pilot project, limited to 1,600 patients, was quickly oversubscribed, said C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer. Dr. Harris also said that when the clinic’s online health records, introduced in 2004, were linked to the Google record the clinic’s records were used more frequently by patients. “It positioned our personal health record more into an activity that they use every day,” Dr. Harris said.

As of now, the clinics and other health organizations that are going to partner up with Google are located only in the US. I have no doubt that this will expand sooner or later.