Google Health Partners with Medicare

First of all, I have to admit I never even knew of Google Health’s existence. I found out at the same time of reading about its new partnership with Medicare.

The Scoop on your health records

I often think it is Google’s master plan to be involved in every aspect of our lives, and Google Health only supports this assumption further. Basically, a new pilot allows residents of Arizona and Utah to import all their Medicare claims into their Google Health accounts.

It’s not entirely clear who initiated this new pilot, but the fact is that Arizona and Utah’s residents can choose other programs aside from Google Health as well to access their medical records online. This leads me to believe that CMS (Center for Medicare Services) may have approached Google Health regarding this idea.

The goal is giving people more insight into their medical records, and streamlining medical record keeping, to avoid or reduce clerical errors.

In Arizona alone about 816,000 people are enrolled in Medicare (according to the 2007 U.S. Census), and Google Health is expected to be a popular tool among these residents. As with most tools where private information is exchanged with third parties (in this case Google), there are privacy concerns.

I can think of just a few ways Google could potentially use the health information send to all Google Health accounts. For example, should we worry about targeted advertising based on our medical history? Perhaps people with complicated medical histories will see ads for more lenient life insurance companies. Or those of us with particular conditions may be seeing ads for brand name medications? These are mere speculations. When logging into my Google Health account I don’t see any ads yet, but who knows what the future holds. After all, Google isn’t what it became today without knowing how to squeeze dollars out of their services.

What I liked about Google Health

When browsing the possibilities in Google Health I noticed it will alert me to possible drug interactions when I enter the pharmaceuticals I am currently popping. I don’t have anything to add to my profile with respects to this, so I can’t test-drive the service to detect whether someone potentially prescribed a lethal cocktail. This does bring up another concern I have, coming from a science background: what if someone does take a combination of drugs that turns out to have a less-than-super effect, and it is not an interaction known to Google Health. Is Google going to be sued along with the prescribing doctor?

How do you feel about importing your Medicare info into Google Health? Are you more excited about having another way of preventing harmful interactions between drugs, than concerned about the privacy issues? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. If you live in Utah or Arizona, and would love to give this a shot, you can get started here.